On 10/2/2012 10:23 AM, Demian Brecht wrote:
I don't use them anymore, but I'm curious about others opinions on this
list...
The more time I spend in Python, discovering what "Pythonic" code is and
such, it seems that I throw away much in terms of academic learnings as
far as "OOP correctness" goes. In doing so, I find that, in general,
overall LOC (yes, I'm aware that this is a poor metric to judge anything
on), readability and overall quality of code seems to go up. Yes, you
give the user much more rope to hang themselves with making the general
assumption that the user knows what they're doing, but we're all
consenting adults here after all, right? ;)
As an example, I initially had an OAuth 2.0 client library that was
roughly 450 LOC (using ABCs, adapter patterns for the various flows,
etc). Dropping this for a more "Pythonic" (at least, what my
interpretation of Pythonic code is) brought the entire library down to
55 LOC. Having said that, the decline in LOC and overall grok-ability
wasn't entirely due to moving away from ABCs and dropping the use of
adapters, but it did have quite a bit to do with it).
As such, I see ABCs as somewhat of an anti-pattern in the Python world.
The concept is obviously essential in non-duck-typed language using
strict OOP, but does it *really* belong in Python?
ABCs were added (fairly recently) in 3.0 for the reasons given in
http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-3119/
It was expected that it would take awhile for them to see good, pythonic
uses. We obviously did okay without them up to 2.7.
They are partly informational, partly meant to help duck typing. I don't
think they are used much in the stdlib (except to register classes) and
I have not used them myself.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
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