super(self.__class__, self) # end of the line for subclassing

I’ve learned (and remembered) a lot in the past two months as I’ve gotten back to coding as my primary job. One thing that I guess I never quite internalized before is how super works. I have been bitten by code that looks something like the following a few times in the past month:

class A(object):
    def init(self):
        super(self.__class__, self).init()

    class B(A):
    def init(self):
        super(B, self).init()

The surprise comes when I try to use my sub-class,

B. Instantiating B() blows up the stack with: RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded while calling a Python object. What? According to the Python 2.7.2 standard library documentation, super “return[s] a proxy object that delegates method calls to a parent or sibling class of type.” So in the case of single inheritance, it delegates access to the super class, it does not return an instance of the super class. In the example above, this means that when you instantiate B, the follow happens:

1. enter `B.__init__()`
2. call `super` on B and call `__init__` on the proxy object
3. enter `A.__init__()`
4. call `super` on `self.__class__` and call `__init__` on the proxy object

self still refers to our instance of B, so calling super points back to A again. In technical terms: Ka-bloom. TL;DR: super(self.__class__, self) may look like a neat trick, but it’s the end of the line for sub-classing. Further reading: Raymond Hettinger’s excellent blog post on super provides a great overview of super and shows off the improved Python 3 syntax, which removes the need to write the class name as part of the super statement. I was really pleased to find the Python standard library documentation links directly to it.