Comments on: Large initializers/ctors?

By: Rob Galanakis

Rob Galanakis — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:03:27 +0000

Whoops you’re right. I should be adding ‘btn’ to FooControl somewhere (so it would be “Button(‘PressMe!!’, self)”). I’ve fixed the post. Does it make more sense now?

By: Rob Galanakis

Rob Galanakis — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 12:01:14 +0000

In reply to Ben Sizer. Done, sorry about that.

By: Ben Sizer

Ben Sizer — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:37:36 +0000

What stops Python from destroying btn in the latter case? btn may have a reference to FooControl.onClick, but there don’t appear to be any references to btn, which makes me think that whether it gets destroyed or not is down to an implementation detail in the addListener() functionality.

By: Ben Sizer

Ben Sizer — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:33:31 +0000

It’s hard to read the example as the code loses its formatting. Are you able to fix it?

By: Rob Galanakis

Rob Galanakis — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:09:33 +0000

In reply to Daniel. Yeah I wish lambdas looked nicer in python (like, say, C#)... they're so clunky. However, the very nicer inner def usage makes these larger inner functions much more appealing. Having to write 'Action inner = (a, b, c) => {...}' for an inner function is hideous, but IMO '(a, b, c) => ...' is really, really nice.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:01:09 +0000

I prefer to keep namespaces uncluttered, especially when your only form of information hiding at the class level is name mangling and politeness on the part of your clients.

Plus as you say, it’s not much fun to rely on calling a set of methods, quite possibly in a fixed order, before you’ve actually got valid objects. It feels brittle. I quite like using builder-like patterns in compiled languages to allow both division of code and ensure well-formed objects, but that’s not particularly relevant.

Closures are in general one of the nicer ways to store state in Python, IMO. Were the lambda feature less… interesting?… in this language I’d even balk at inner functions. The function definition boilerplate doesn’t really add anything.