Does Python really follow its philosophy of "Readability counts"?

[Mark Wooding]

"Russ P." <Russ.Paielli at gmail.com> writes:

> Actually, in addition to the enforcement of "private," you also need
> the enforcement of "protected."

Oh, heavens.  If you want C++ or any of its progeny, you know where to
find them.  Besides, those languages have a horrific design mistake
because they conflate the class system (which manages the units of
behaviour) with the module system (which deals with the units of
implementation).

It's precisely because Python's boundaries are fairly porous that it
doesn't fall into this trap.  (There's the small matter of sharing the
class and instance attribute namespaces, but a little bit of care seems
to work out OK.)

Even so, why do you think you are that you know better than the next
programmer -- whoever he might be -- which parts of your class he should
mess with?  You can make suggestions, recommendations, in your
documentation: provide the raw materials so that he can make informed
decisions about whether he wants to mess with your class's internals.
But the `here's a black box: there isn't and never will be any
justifiable reason why you might want to poke about inside'
control-freakery of people who like this sort of thing just rubs me up
the wrong way.

Yes, I know that some people have to work with drooling idiots who don't
know a stable interface from volatile implementation details or
documented behaviour from a bug that'll be fixed in the next version.
Python just isn't the right language for those people.  They can use
Java or something -- hey, it's presumably good for something, maybe it's
this -- but those who know better don't deserve to be penalized for
their sake.

-- [mdw]