Do you find yourself occasionally wishing you could freeze a misbehaving program at an arbitrary point in time and then examining what was going on interactively?

That's exactly what the debugger is for, but sometimes it's just too much of a bother to run your program inside it, you have to set breakpoints, etc.

Well there's a really simple alternative: call the debugger from an arbitrary point in your program, like this...

Every now and then Liraz and I find ourselves chatting about how much we love Python, but more so the lessons we have learned from coding, and how to apply them to create beautiful Python code. I've tried to refine some of the "lessons" into practical guidelines that I apply religiously to all new code I write, and the refactoring of old code I written.