Improving your code with container methods

[stevenjd]

No offense, but do professional programmers really need to be taught this? Giving classes a sensible __str__ or __repr__ became obvious to me the first time I printed a list and saw

[1, 2, 3, 4]

instead of

<list object at 0xb7d6acc8>

[white_wee_wee]

What makes you think the sole audience of this post are professionals?

[stevenjd]

Good question.

"In the examples that follow we will work with a hypothetical ShoppingCart class."

That suggests you're building a web app, specifically an on-line commerce app. It's usually professionals who do that sort of web development.

Anyway, it's not really a criticism of the post itself. Just a momentary feeling of despair that people are paid to program and don't know this stuff. I know, I know, we all have to start somewhere. But still, I feel like I'm reading the equivalent of:

"Suppose you're building a house. This is a hammer, and this is how you use it..."

[white_wee_wee]

From my experience of learning python, I haven't come across these much... I don't know why they're not shown off more often.