functional or object-oriented?

[Tom Anderson]

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.