Avoiding Private Methods

Assume MyClass._dangerous(self) is a private method. We could have implemented the same functionality without a private method as follows:

• Define a class InnerClass with the same __init__ as MyClass
• Define InnerClass.dangerous(self) with the same logic of MyClass._dangerous
• Make MyClass into a wrapper class over InnerClass, where the wrapped attribute is private.
• Proxy all necessary work into InnerClass.

This might seem onerous, but consider that now, dangerous is part of the public interface of a class, and would need to be explicitly documented as to assumptions and guarantees. This documentation would have had to have been in comments around _dangerous anyway -- in order to clarify what its assumptions are, and what invariants it is violating in MyClass -- otherwise, maintaining the code that calls _dangerous would be hard.

Of course, this documentation is almost certain to be missing. The existence of _dangerous itself implies this was an almost mechanical refactoring of similar code into a method, with the excuse of "its private" used to avoid considering the invariants and interface.

Even if the documentation did exist, now it is possible to unit-test that the documentation is correct. Furthermore, if we use best practices when we define MyClass -- in other words, avoid creating an InnerClass object in the initializer, and only creating it in an MyClass.from_parameters, we are also in a good position to unit test MyClass.

This, of course, presented the worst case: the code for _dangerous touches absolutely every data member of MyClass. In real life, the worst case is not often encountered. When we look at a private method as a code smell, and contemplate the best way to refactor it away, it turns out that we often can find a coherent set of attributes that really does make sense as InnerClass on their own merits.

Credit: This is based on an off-handed comment Glyph made in his blog post about attrs. I am also grateful to him for reviewing a draft copy of this post, and making many useful suggestions. All mistakes in interpretation or explanation are mine alone.