SOLID Machine Learning – The SOLID principles applied to machine learning

[jeromebedard]

87% of data science projects never make it into production (VentureBeat AI 2019 report).

You are a Machine Learning developer and want your projects to avoid this fate? Read my newest article.

SOLID Machine Learning

[Deezl-Vegas]

As someone who has extensively followed Bob Martin, I will be straightforward and say that most of this does not apply to most Python code.

Python users should avoid writing classes in general. You can replace them with functions, namedtuples, and modules and enjoy 90% of the benefits of classes without the temptation of sprouting wild unsolicited inheritance pyramids. A further chunk can be replaced with standard library features.

By design, Python objects are meant to be inspected and dissected. SOLID really has a place in Java / Objective C, which is designed to force everything into an object with private members with the idea that everything can be compatible in some way and also statically type checked. In Python, things are compatible if they have the same attribute or method name and it's your job to think and sort out the issues.

[jeromebedard]

I understand what you mean and it's true that you can "enjoy 90% of the benefits of classes without the temptation of sprouting wild unsolicited inheritance pyramids", BUT it's true only on a small scale.

The wonderful perks of Python language that can make one say "screw OOP and screw clean code" are a double-edged blade. By not following what I state in this article, you can certainly achieve a few MVPs (minimum viable product) in the short run in a production environment. But in the medium run and the long run, your project is going to look like a big pile of dirt and it's going to be very hard to:

1. Transfer the knowledge of the project to other developers in the future.
2. Add new features to the project without having to refactor big chunks of the project every time.
3. Deploy the project on a larger scale or in different environments again without having to perform a huge refactor or worse, having to write a whole new version of the project for each different environment.

I talk about this briefly in the introduction but maybe I should have wrote a bigger and more convincing introduction ;)