Advanced Python: 9 Best Practices to Apply When You Define Classes

How to make your code more readable and maintainable

Photo by FERESHTEH AZADI on Unsplash

At its core, Python is an object-oriented programming (OOP) language. Being an OOP language, Python handles data and functionalities by supporting various features centered around objects. For instance, data structures are all objects, including primitive types (e.g., integers and strings) which aren’t considered objects in some other languages. For another instance, functions are all objects, and they are merely attributes of other objects where they are defined (e.g., class or module).

Although you can use built-in data types and write a bunch of functions without creating any custom classes, chances are that your code can become harder and harder to maintain when the project’s scope grows. These separate pieces have no shared themes, and there will be lots of hassles to manage connections between them, although much of the information is related.

In these scenarios, it’s worth defining your own classes, which will allow you to group related information and improve the structural design of your project. More importantly, the long-term maintainability of your codebase will be improved, because you’ll be dealing with less pieced code. However, there is a catch — this is only true when your class declaration is done in the right way such that the benefits of defining custom classes can outweigh the overhead of managing them.

In this article, I’d like to review nine important best practices that you should consider applying to your custom classes.

1. Good Names

When you’re defining your own class, you’re adding a new baby to your codebase. You should give the class a very good name. Although the only limit of your class name is the rules of a legal Python variable (e.g., can’t start with a number), there are preferred ways to give class names.

• Use nouns that are easy to pronounce. It’s especially important if you work on a team project. During a group presentation, you probably don’t want to be the person to say, “in this case, we create an instance of the Zgnehst class.” In addition, being easy to pronounce also means the name shouldn’t be too long. I can barely think…