How much sanity checking is required for function inputs?

[Michael Torrie]

On 04/23/2016 07:45 PM, Christopher Reimer wrote:
> 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.

Procedural programming does not necessarily mean BASIC-style goto hell.
Not sure why you would think that.  In fact that's not really what
procedural programming is about.  However, Mr. Selik wasn't advocating
procedural programming at all.  Not defining a class does not make your
code precdural.  But using classes does not mean your code is *not*
procedural. If you are using an event-driven framework then I will say,
yes your code is not procedural.

There are many aspects to Pythonic programming, not just OOP.  For
example using modules to store shared state for your program components
is very pythonic, rather than using classes.  A module is kind of like a
singleton instance, and still is object-oriented by the way (the module
is an object).  Sadly Java really messed up people by using classes as a
namespace mechanism.  That was quite a mistake.  Really messed with
people's expectations of OOP.

I would say that pythonic programming involves defining classes when
it's appropriate, and not doing so when something else will work just as
well and be simpler.