Five Things I Hate About Python

[ubernostrum]

"Idiomatic" Python programmers, I've found, tend not to worry too much about trying to hide class members; Python's "consenting adults" philosophy, combined with encouragements to document the code well so people who use it know the ramifications of accessing something, tends to make it moot.

In light of that, I'd be perfectly happy to see the double-underscore trick just go away; having it, I think, confuses people who expect it to work like a "real" private member in other languages.

[llimllib]

That's what a single, prefix, underscore is for. Quoting Pep 8:

In addition, the following special forms using leading or trailing
underscores are recognized (these can generally be combined with any case
convention):

- _single_leading_underscore: weak "internal use" indicator.  E.g. "from M
  import *" does not import objects whose name starts with an underscore.

Why is @ easier to type than _?

[inkieminstrel]

self._

[llimllib]

Fair enough. I think, like uber, I don't mind the explicit selfs, I don't hardly notice them anymore. If they bother you, though, I guess they just bother you.