functional or object-oriented?
Tom Anderson
twic at urchin.earth.li
Tue Sep 20 06:19:50 EDT 2005
On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, beza1e1 wrote:
> I see myself shifting more and more over to the functional kind of
> coding. Could be related to the Haskell, we had to learn in CS. Now i
> was wondering, how other people use Python?
I'm a lot like you. I grew up with java, and learned to write classical
object-oriented code. When i came over to python, i very quickly found
myself writing more procedural, and in fact functional, code.
I think this is a result of the kind of programs i'm writing. Objects are
good when you have entities that will live a long and unpredictable life -
chunks of text in a word processor, for example. If you're writing
programs with simpler narratives, though, as i often am ("read in this
data, parse it, transform it like so, shuffle it like this, then write it
out like this"), a functional approach allows a simpler, cleaner factoring
of the code.
> With functional i mean my files mostly consist of functions and only
> rarely i use "class". The library modules seem to be mostly written the
> object-way on the other hand.
The thing about OO code is that the pieces are self-contained, which makes
this a good way to write library code. That's not a good explanation, but
i haven't had any coffee this morning, so that's the best i can do right
now.
tom
--
Science runs with us, making us Gods.
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