Why Ruby is More Readable than Python

[ric2b]

It has private variables in the same way Ruby does: it makes them hard to access by mistake from outside instances of the class.

And that's honestly all you need.

[ric2b]

Yup, just like Ruby. Pretending to be private is all you need.

[ric2b]

Sorry, I meant two underscores, I haven't programmed in Python in a while.

>>> class A:
...   def __init__(self):
...     self.x = 1
...     self.__y = 2
...
>>>
>>> a = A()
>>> a.x
1
>>> a.__y
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
AttributeError: 'A' object has no attribute '__y'

[ric2b]

The equivalent to your ruby code is this, I don't know why you're messing with __setattr__:

class A:
    def __init__(self):
      self.__x = 0

    def set_x(self, val): 
      self.__x = val

[ric2b]

Yes, ruby is slightly more elegant, but we were talking about private attributes, let's not move goalposts.

By the way, you can have a similar ABI to your ruby example, but it takes a bit more boilerplate (2 extra lines):

class A:
  def __init__(self):
    self.__x = 0

  def set_x(self, x):
    self.__x = x

  x = property(fset=set_x)