A tale of yak shaving

[import_that]

This is a couple of years old now, but still interesting: Barry Warsaw, one of the Python core developers, shares the tale of an hairy debugging experience and the yak shaving needed to solve it:

Everyone who reported the problem said the TypeError was getting thrown on the for-statement line. The exception message indicated that Python was getting some object that it was trying to convert to an integer, but was failing. How could you possible get that exception when either making a copy of a list or iterating over that copy? Was the list corrupted? Was it not actually a list but some list-like object that was somehow returning non-integers for its min and max indexes?