Re:Python decorators they don't tell you about
by ramnes on Sunday January 07, 2018 @12:32PM
(#16091659)
Annotation and registration are indeed common and proper uses of decorators.
What I dislike are mostly the inputs 8, 9, 13, 14, and 23 that could give nasty ideas to an inexperienced developer, while a more experienced developer wouldn't need them to understand that a decorator is just a syntactic sugar and that, yes, "applying a decorator d to a function x [is] the same as writing the definition of x, then x = d(x)" (which the author seems to refute).
I understand that those examples are solely intended to show that "it works", but they aren't educational to me.
Annotation, registration, dispatch and verification are pretty much the most common uses for decorators. If using decorators for these is bad, then decorators aren't needed at all: function wrapping is much more rarely used than those other four, and would not warrant an additional syntax construct.