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Asked: 2026-05-18T04:31:57+00:00

I am new to OOP and hence, am looking for suggestions on good practice

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I am new to OOP and hence, am looking for suggestions on good practice for coding something where the following issue arises.

I am defining a Seller(a, b, c, d) class. There are many attributes of this class, two of which are, mostRecentProfit and profitHistory. However, values of these two are not known when the class is initialized. Some other steps in the program have to be executed before these are realized. My questions is:

In the __init__(a, b, c, d) of the seller class, should I write 

self.mostRecentProfit = None
self.profitHistory = []

or, should I not define these at all in the __init__ method. The reason former appears attractive to me is that by looking at the __init__() method, I can know all the attributes for the class. However, that may not be a good reason for doing this. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank you.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would define them. In my experience, not doing so when the code dealing with the instances makes frequent references to those properties, means you end up forever typing if object.profitHistory: before looping etc. With an empty list there, you can skip those conditions. And as you say, it makes it much more legible.

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