1000 lines of very verbose code can be easily cleaned up

Most of the objects use getters and setters in a completely unnecessary way, adding literally 1000 lines of noise to the code.

(For an explanation of why they are unnecessary, see http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-java.html )

Many other methods on the simple data objects have lots of duplication and could be simplified and shortened a lot by using some of Python’s dynamic features, like introspection etc. (Especially AsDict, __eq__ etc.)

Would you merge these kind of changes if I submitted a pull request? Or after the move to API v1.1?

[bear]

I worked on the same project as PJE that caused him to write that article (and I remember talking to him about it) so yes I’m aware of the pitfalls of this method.

The original author of python-twitter used a code generator to create all of this based on the protobuf description that he created for the twitter api - so that’s why you see lines and lines of code that seem to scream “WTF”.

All that aside, it has always been in the back of my mind to see if most of it could be simplified. I am leery of real heavy use of introspection and “fancy” methods - only from a code maintenance point of view.

So yes, if you want to dig in and start with some of the secondary classes so we can start haggling over some of the details, I would definitely welcome it. I would use it as the starting point for the v1.1 changes since that is a perfect time to break things.

thanks!

[sebastianw]

I tried something at sebastianw/python-twitter@c7892489b38867163c69ba16edae38e3394fd97a. Replaced the Status class with a much shorter version. It seems to work but I’m not sure if that is the way to go forward with the other classes. Coments welcome.