I highly recommend reading Stevedore package's excellent documentation [1] to see practical examples of how entry points can be used as a plugin manager in applications.

[1] - https://docs.openstack.org/stevedore/latest/index.html

Entry points are excellent at making your scripts start slooooooooow.

Compare

  $ time python -m pyflakes /dev/null
  
  real	0m0.225s
  user	0m0.103s
  sys	0m0.008s

  $ time pyflakes /dev/null
  
  real	0m2.468s
  user	0m1.738s
  sys	0m0.055s

Way too much ink wasted on cuteness and too little on explanation.

I got stumped at:

"In particular, the magic happens in get_sneks. The call to pkg_resources.iter_entry_points('snek_types') iterates over all the entry points that were registered under the name "snek_types". So, external packages can define an entry point called "snek_types" in their setup.py, and snek will dynamically load it at runtime."

Wait. What entry points were registered under the name "snek_types"? Where were they regeistered as such? I think I must be missing something, or maybe that registration was hidden somewhere among all the fancy snakes. Can someone help explain this in a clearer way?

What is the actual value of entry points over just marking a script +x and putting somewhere on the path? All I see is a bunch of added complexity.