> What are emphatically not pretty or useful are Python’s leading underscores to loosely enforce encapsulation.
Python will not prevent anyone from doing something dumb. It'll just force them to acknowledge that by forcing them to use a convention. As a library writer, I'm free to change or remove anything that starts with an underscore because, if someone else is depending on it, frankly, they had it coming. I can assume everyone who uses my library is a responsible adult and I can treat them as that.
> And why are some classes (int, str, float) allowed to be lower case
Because they are part of the language like `else` or `def`. Only Guido can do that. ;-)
If we look in `collections`, we can see `defaultdict` sitting side-by-side with `OrderedDict` and `Counter`. I've long since resigned myself to the fact that naming consistency is not Python's strong suit :)
> As a library writer, I'm free to change or remove anything that starts with an underscore because, if someone else is depending on it, frankly, they had it coming. I can assume everyone who uses my library is a responsible adult and I can treat them as that.
Totally agree, as an user, I feel anxious whenever I have to use underscored names. It's great that Python still allows me to do it and there were few times when it was useful, but when it stops working I know it's 100% on me.
Python will not prevent anyone from doing something dumb. It'll just force them to acknowledge that by forcing them to use a convention. As a library writer, I'm free to change or remove anything that starts with an underscore because, if someone else is depending on it, frankly, they had it coming. I can assume everyone who uses my library is a responsible adult and I can treat them as that.
> And why are some classes (int, str, float) allowed to be lower case
Because they are part of the language like `else` or `def`. Only Guido can do that. ;-)