Hacker News Reader

Comment by learplant | Hacker News Reader

I find that __call__ is very confusing, but maybe because I'm not used to seeing if often.

What is the benefit compared to having a method named "add" that also explains the behavior?

If an object is callable you can use it in places that might conventionally expect functions. The utility of that is very situational, though. I've only used it a handful of times myself over the years I've known and used Python.

It may also give you a "clearer" (in quotes because subjective) presentation for something you're trying to do.

I see it a lot in HuggingFace, and use it myself for classes that are used like a function, especially when the obvious method name is the verb form of the class name

    processor = SomeProcessor.load("path/to/config")

    # with __call__
    processed_inputs = processor(inputs)

    # less awkward than
    processes_inputs = processor.process(inputs)

The only benefit is to the human, same as @property or even @dataclass.

Thanks for writing that up! I disagree though, I prefer the processor.process for clarity, and for not adding another way of doing things that regular methods already do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com