I don't really see what the big deal is. It seems useful to simplify code that would otherwise need temp variables sprinkled everywhere, and no one is holding a gun to your head and making you use it.<br>Most of the criticism seems to be "people are stupid / lazy / easily confused, so we can't have nice things" or "people won't do what you want with it, because project-wide coding style standards don't exist apparently, so we can't have nice things" but that applies to any advanced feature like list comprehensions, lamdas, gotos, exceptions, recursion or any of a dozen other features that also exist in Python.<br>The remaining criticism seems like people having a knee jerk emotional reaction, like people who think there is absolutely no valid use case for goto ever, and then reee when they see it used for valid reasons like unwinding stacks or exception handling in C. It's debatable that := violates "The Zen of Python", and even if it does, a design guideline like "The Zen of Python" is a guideline not a suicide pact.