Clean Code in Python

Reusing code

Descriptors are a generic tool and a powerful abstraction that we can use to avoid code duplication. The best way to decide when to use descriptors is to identify cases where we would be using a property (whether for its get logic, set logic, or both), but repeating its structure many times.

Properties are just a particular case of descriptors (the @property decorator is a descriptor that implements the full descriptor protocol to define their get, set, and delete actions), which means that we can use descriptors for far more complex tasks.

Another powerful type we have seen for reusing code was decorators, as explained in Chapter 5, Using Decorators to Improve Our Code. Descriptors can help us create to better decorators by ...