TIL Poor man's quoting in Python

In Lisp, you can quote an expression to delay its evaluation while passing it around as a value. In Python, this means in practice, I want a function that looks like it's executing, but reality, I'm delaying its actual execution.

I can use decorators to achieve this.

# A thunk-based Efx decorator
def Efx(func):
    @wraps(func)
    def thunk(*children, **args):
        args['children'] = children
        return lambda: func(*children, **args)
    return thunk

And then I can use it like so:

@Efx
def SomeComponent(*children, **args):
    return ComponentA(
    	ComponentB(propA = args.propA)
    )
    
thunk = SomeComponent(propA = "hello")

# The component doesn't get executed until we call the thunk.
thunk() = # some dict representation of components

The @wraps decorator transfers the metadata of the function, so that we can query SomeComponent()'s metadata, even though it's wrapped in a decorator.