Python: Real-World Data Science

Adding behavior to class data with properties

Throughout this module, we've been focusing on the separation of behavior and data. This is very important in object-oriented programming, but we're about to see that, in Python, the distinction can be uncannily blurry. Python is very good at blurring distinctions; it doesn't exactly help us to "think outside the box". Rather, it teaches us to stop thinking about the box.

Before we get into the details, let's discuss some bad object-oriented theory. Many object-oriented languages (Java is the most notorious) teach us to never access attributes directly. They insist that we write attribute access like this:

class Color: def __init__(self, rgb_value, name): self._rgb_value = rgb_value self._name = name ...