__init__

Hi, Hank de Roover:

In Python, you must unpack a dictionary to be able to access its values efficiently. You must also pass into self, because __init__ is something you want to be run on an instance of the class. In methods, the naming convention in languages that require dictionaries to be unpacked to be efficiently accessed is kwargs

You then use kwargs.get (or whatever name you decided to use for the variable containing the result of unpacking the dictionary) to get the value for a particular key with an optional second parameter to have an alternate value obtained if a particular key couldn't be found within the unpacked dictionary.

For example the following code snippet will obtain the value associated with key foo in an unpacked dictionary kwargs; if it doesn't exist, baz is returned:

self.bar = kwargs.get("foo", "baz")

The use of self in the previous code example may have been strange to you.

In Python, to declare instance methods concisely, you pass in self as the first parameter. This is needed to actually use self to explicitly set, modify, and del properties of a particular instance.

Here's a snippet of the advice of both.:

class Student:
  def __init__(self, **kwargs):
    self.name = kwargs.get("name", "some name")