On Wed, 25 May 2011 12:31:33 -0600, Ian Kelly wrote: > I would recommend against using super() in general. > > http://fuhm.net/super-harmful/
If you actually read that article, carefully, without being fooled by the author's provocative ex-title and misleading rhetoric, you will discover that super is not harmful. What is harmful is making unjustified assumptions about what super does, and about the code you are calling, and hence misusing super. You have to read all the way to the bottom of the article to see the author say in the TODO section: "Give some examples of why super really is necessary sometimes" Even before that, you will read why *not* using super often fails badly. If James Knight, the author, is correct that super is harmful, it seems that you're in trouble because *not using super* is also harmful. If you search the mailing lists of python-...@python.org, you will find a debate between James and Guido van Russum where James eventually acknowledges that he is wrong to call super harmful. There's a reason that he has changed the title of the page from "Python's Super Considered Harmful" to the damning-with-faint-praise "Python's Super is nifty, but you can't use it". The new title is also *simply wrong*, because you can use it. James even tells you what you need to do to use it correctly. The truth is that for multiple inheritance, you better be using super or your code is probably buggy (unless you manually duplicate what super does for you). And for single inheritance, it makes no difference whether you use super or not. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
