All of this is true. Its also weird to me that the evaluation of a boolean expression can return return a value that is neither True nor False (yes I know the value evaluates to true, that's why the trick works).

Which is why I just do `if param is None:... ` and not worry about the few extra lines of code and move on.

The trick does have the nice property of delaying execution for evaluating what the default parameter though. The only other way to do that would involve writing lambdas which is even more code? The sibling comment suggesting a package looks like even more code to write as a user. I think any really elegant fix would have to be done in the language itself.