Metaclasses in Python

Previously: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860031" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860031</a>

I find metaclasses philosophically unsound. If one introduces metaclasses, what about meta-metaclasses, meta-meta-metaclasses. In this regard Self's prototypical oop seems more coherent - there are only objects. Even object/class duality looks philosophically more attractive than object/class/metaclass trio.

Is it me or the first metaclass example doesn't work.<p>I'm using Python 2.7.2+ on Debian and I can't get __metaclass__ force upper case attributes inside of a 'module'

tl;dr don't use metaclasses

If I'm not mistaken the authors of Smalltalk realized that metaclasses were a mistake long before they appeared in Python. Yet they were added to Python anyway.

Python is a very cool language. I wonder if using __metaclass__ in some fashion would allow for javascript-like prototyping.

If you find yourself doing things like this in Python you should probably switch to Ruby.