Many beginners don't write files in order to import them. For them, these name-checking is simply adding noise. If you want to do something in this area, I think a much more useful (and difficult) course of action would be to check on the opposite end. If an AttributeError "module blah has no attribute foo" is raised, then check whether a file in the current directory (or simply the current file) is named blah, and there is also a stdlib blah that has fool.