If You’re Not Using Python DATA CLASSES Yet, You Should ?

This video is a tutorial about Python's dataclasses. I take you through an example that shows what you can do with them. Python data classes are - as you'd expect - in particular suitable to model classes that represent data, and as such they offer easy mechanisms to initialize, print, order, sort, and compare data.

Note that although I'm using a sort_index attribute, strictly speaking that's not needed in this case, because a data class uses a tuple of its attributes in the class definition as the default for sorting. I'm not a fan of this kind of hidden behavior, so I prefer to do it explicitly (using something that is called sort_index in this case). Another advantage of using a separate field, is that you can do more complicated ordering, using for example a weighted combination of age and strength.

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Some interesting links:
- https://realpython.com/python-data-classes/
- Frozen instances: https://docs.python.org/3/library/dataclasses.html#frozen-instances
- If you want to go 'next-level' with dataclasses, check out Pydantic (https://pydantic-docs.helpmanual.io/). Pydantic enforces type hints at runtime, and offers a really nice extension for data validation.
- The code from this video is available here: https://github.com/ArjanCodes/2021-dataclasses

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? Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:33 Behavior-driven vs data-driven classes
2:11 Explaining the example
3:31 Creating a dataclass
4:37 Sorting and comparing
6:58 Default values
7:40 Creating read-only (frozen) objects
8:55 String representation of data
9:34 Final thoughts

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Thumbnail photo background by Markus Spiske: https://unsplash.com/@markusspiske

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