Best practice - accessing object variables

Question

I've been making a lot of classes an Python recently and I usually just access instance variables like this:

object.variable_name

But often I see that objects from other modules will make wrapper methods to access variables like this:

object.getVariable()

What are the advantages/disadvantages to these different approaches and is there a generally accepted best practice (even if there are exceptions)?

Answer 1

There should never be any need in Python to use a method call just to get an attribute. The people who have written this are probably ex-Java programmers, where that is idiomatic.

In Python, it's considered proper to access the attribute directly. If it turns out that you need some code to run when accessing the attribute, for instance to calculate it dynamically, you should use the @property decorator.