How much sanity checking is required for function inputs?

[Christopher Reimer]

On 4/22/2016 1:40 PM, Michael Selik wrote:
> Frankly, for someone coming from Java, the best advice is to not write any
> classes until you must. Of course classes in Python are very useful. It's
> just that your Java habits are unnecessary and often counter-productive.

I disagree. I wrote procedural scripts and translated old BASIC games 
into Python for two years. One day I came across a Python book that 
described the principles of subclassing from a base class for chess 
pieces, but there was no code to demonstrate the process. I had no 
problem creating the Python classes. That's how my research project got 
started to build a chess engine. If you ever check the academic 
literature for chess programming, this research project could turn into 
a lifelong endeavor.

I had to confront all the bad habits I brought over Java and change my 
code to be more Pythonic. This is where I started having fun, learning 
the tricks and collapsing multi-line code into a single line code. I've 
learned more about Python in the few weeks than I had in two years of 
writing procedural scripts and translating BASIC goto hell.

Thank you,

Chris R.