Named tuples and enums do entirely different things (loosely-speaking: the former are product types, the latter are sum types).

You also probably want dataclasses [1] instead of named tuples.

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/dataclasses.html

Or data bearing enums, which bring some of the best of all of those worlds, with (value declaration, not usage) exhaustiveness enforced at compile time:

https://github.com/klaviyo/matrix_enum

My colleague and I started making use of that pattern last year (before open sourcing the package) and found it very useful.

They do different things but in the wild are used in the same way. Data classes are not immutable so it would not be ideal for what I used named tuples for.

Data classes can be made immutable using ‘frozen=True’. It sucks that it’s not default though.

Can you give an example of how you use enums and named tuples in the same way? That just doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to me, but maybe I’m missing something.