My Number 1 Java to Python Gotcha

Fredrik Lundh is almost certainly a benevolent alien in disguise, sent to Earth to help the pitiful human race drag itself up out of the muck.

In a recent post, he touched on something that burned me BAD when I first started slinging pythion: using mutables as default parameters.

My particular run-in was a cousin of what Fredik describes, using a mutable as a default class attribute. I had a class like this:

class MyPage(object):
    errors = []
    def __init__(self):
        # set me up

    def run(self):
        try:    
            self.build_page()
        except:
            self.errors.append("Oops. Something went wrong")

My problem was that I was setting a mutable as a default attribute value. This meant that each instance of MyPage was sharing the same error list; analagous to a static class variable in Java. It wasn't long before everything had errors, since the array just kept growing. This happened in a production environment. Sub-awesome indeed. What I SHOULD have done is this:

class MyPage(object):
    errors = None
    def __init__(self):
        # set me up
        self.errors = []

    def run(self):
        try:    
            self.build_page()
        except:
            self.errors.append("Oops. Something went wrong")

The __init__ clears out the array each time a new object is created. No sharing between instances. No pain.