It's a favourite pattern of mine too. I'm pretty sure it's bad practice but in o... | Hacker News

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		b0b10101 on Aug 29, 2023 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: The Python dictionary dispatch pattern It's a favourite pattern of mine too. I'm pretty sure it's bad practice but in one project i needed some form of parameterised extensibility (parsing a broad mix of files onto a standard format). So what i did was have other devs subclass an abstract base class I created (with some predefined attributes and methods to fill in) and then generated my execution dictionary based on the attributes of the subclasses of the base class.

sanderjd on Aug 29, 2023 [–]

This doesn't sound like a bad pattern to me. (Though I certainly think I have seen bad implementations of it.)

But if the keys are known statically (as in the article), I think it's generally better to use named functions.

But it's good to be aware of the capability, for cases like you're describing.

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