Python Classes for Java programmers

The purpose of this post is to highlight some important differences between the two programming languages when dealing with classes and, there so, Object-Oriented programming. It is meant to be a introduction to the topic, which I will discuss it further on future posts.

As a fan of Game of Thrones and since its last season has just started, I’ve written a simple Game of Thrones example of the House’s members on both languages with the same output, in order to make it easier to compare. First lets take a look at the complete Java code, and after the Python version, containing code comments on each difference.

Let’s look at each class:

Example of a single inheritance, although Python supports multiple inheritance. Here we refer to parent class through super() function.

The title property is the python version of a getter. To declare one we make use of @property decorator. I won’t explain what decorators are now because It will be covered in future posts among other features I’m learning in Python. For now, just believe me that it is a getter :)

A private method also starts with double underscore. And finally, The way we declare a class method in Python is with @classmethod decorator.

Worth to mention that the new keyword is not needed and we usually can avoid the use of for loops with list and/or dictionary comprehension .

This was a quick introduction to classes in Python for those familiar with java. There is a lot more to cover, which I plan do to in the future.

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