Callable class instances versus closures in Python

March 16, 2019

Recently I read Don't Make It Callable (via), which advocates avoiding having your class instances be callable (by __call__ on your classes). Let me quote its fundamental thesis on using __call__:

At first, like every operator overload, this seems like a nifty idea. And then, like most operator overload cases, we need to ask: why? Why is this better than a named method?

I wholeheartedly agree with this, and in the beginning I agreed with the whole article. But then I began thinking about my usage of __call__ and something that the article advocated as a replacement, and found that I partially disagree with it. To quote it again:

If something really is nothing more than a function call with some extra arguments, then either a closure or a partial would be appropriate.

(By 'partial', the article means the use of functools.partial to construct a partially applied function.)

My view is that if you have to provide something that's callable, a callable class is better than a closure because it's more amenable to inspection. A class instance is a clear thing; you can easily see what it is, what it's doing, and inspect the state of instances (especially if you remember to give your class a useful __str__ or __repr__). You can even easily give them (and their methods) docstrings, so that help() provides helpful information about them.

None of this is true of closures (unless you go well out of your way) and only a bit of it is true of partially applied functions. Even if you go out of your way to provide a docstring for your closure function, the whole assemblage is basically an opaque blob. A partially applied function is somewhat better because the resulting object exposes some information, but it's still not as open and transparent as an object.

This becomes especially important if your callable thing is going to be called repeatedly and hold internal state. It's far easier to make this internal state visible, potentially modifiable, and above all debuggable if you're using an object than if you try to wrap all of this up inside a function (or a closure) that manipulates its internal variables. Python objects are designed to be transparent (at least by default), as peculiar as this sounds in general.

(After all, one of the usual stated purposes of objects is to encapsulate things away from the outside world.)

Callable classes are unquestionably more verbose than closures, partially applied functions, or even lambdas, and sometimes this is annoying. But I think you should use them for anything that is not trivial by itself, and maybe even for small things depending on how long the resulting callable entities are going to live and how far away they are going to propagate in your program. The result is likely to be more maintainable and more debuggable.

PS: This somewhat biases me toward providing things with the entire instance and using __call__ over providing a method on the instance. If you're trying to debug something, it's harder to go from a method to inspecting the instance it comes from. Providing just a method is probably okay if the use is 'close' to the class definition (eg, in the same file or the same module), because then you can look back and forth easily. Providing the full instance is what I'd do if I was passing the callable thing around to another module or returning it as part of my public API.


Comments on this page:

By newt0311@gmail.com at 2019-03-17 09:22:25:

My concern with callable classes has always been that you might want multiple behaviors from a single class.

If you need something callable, why not use a bound method? They have a reference to the parent too.

Written on 16 March 2019.
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Last modified: Sat Mar 16 22:59:13 2019
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