"Interfaces" in Python: Yea or Nay? [closed]

I'm not sure what the point of that is. Interfaces (of this form, anyway) are largely to work around the lack of multiple inheritance. But Python has MI, so why not just make an abstract class?

class Something(object):    def some_method(self):        raise NotImplementedError()    def some_other_method(self, some_argument):        raise NotImplementedError()

In Python 2.6 and later, you can use abstract base classes instead. These are useful, because you can then test to see if something implements a given ABC by using "isinstance". As usual in Python, the concept is not as strictly enforced as it would be in a strict language, but it's handy. Moreover there are nice idiomatic ways of declaring abstract methods with decorators - see the link above for examples.

There are some cases where interfaces can be very handy. Twisted makes fairly extensive use of Zope interfaces, and in a project I was working on Zope interfaces worked really well. Enthought's traits packaged recently added interfaces, but I don't have any experience with them.

Beware overuse though -- duck typing and protocols are a fundamental aspect of Python, only use interfaces if they're absolutely necessary.