Summary

This chapter showed you some of the places where decorators can be used to make our code simpler and add some fairly complex behavior to very simple functions. Truthfully, most decorators are more complex than the regular function would have been by simply adding the functionality directly, but the added advantage of applying the same pattern to many functions and classes is generally well worth it.

Decorators have so many uses to make your functions and classes smarter and more convenient to use:

• Debugging
• Validation
• Argument convenience (pre-filling or converting arguments)
• Output convenience (converting the output to a specific type)

The most important takeaway of this chapter should be to never forget functools.wraps when wrapping a function. Debugging decorated functions can be rather difficult because of (unexpected) behavior modification, but losing attributes as well can make that problem much worse.

The next chapter will...