Question

Code below is from Django‘s settings.py. Since everything in Python is an object, why don’t just pass installed apps as tuple of objects:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
  django.contrib.auth,
  django.contrib.contenttypes,
.....

Is there some strong reason why they do this:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
  'django.contrib.auth',
  'django.contrib.contenttypes',
.....

instead?

I’m new to Python and Django, so don’t judge me too much, please.

Answer 1

Passing module or class name as a string is typical solution to avoiding circular import error.
For example, if settings file contains import myapp.models and myapp.models contains from django.conf import settings this would lead to circular import.