Not Just Another Quick Object-Oriented Python Crash Course — Part 1

Dimitrios Gourtzilidis
8 min readFeb 3, 2024

Continuing the series of articles focusing on Python as the main tool for financial data science.

This article will focus on the object-oriented programming paradigm of Python, which is a fully object-oriented programming language. OOP is a fundamental paradigm in Python.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

In the Physical World

Objects in the real world are described in our natural language by nouns, like “car”, “person”, or “dog”. Our natural language also describes each object with adjectives like “fast”, “tall”, and “happy”.

Objects can also perform various actions; for example, “the car” can “transport” people, “the person” can “read” or “write”, and “the dog” can “bark”.

Similarly, each object in our physical language can be categorized into a broader category; for example, a car is a “vehicle”, a person is a “homo sapiens”, and a dog is an “animal”. According to their category, we expect them to have some characteristics that are common in this broader category; for example, all homo sapiens “breath”, all cars have “four wheels”, and all dogs like to “smell”.

In Python

In any programming language with object-oriented programming abilities, an object comprises a dataset and the behaviors…

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