Why would you use property?

You crate a class with a specific attribute, say, name. At the beginning you are happy to use it only as:

object.name = 'Tomek'
print(object.name)

but after a while you realise that you need something else happening during setting a name and getting a name, something in the background, e.g. printing you’ve just set a name and you’ve just got a name. This would be easy if you had defined separate getters and setters, but you didn’t and there are folks who already use this class, so they wouldn’t be happy if they had to change their code.

So you’re on your own. Here’s how you solve this problem:

class SomeFolk:

    def __init__(self, name):
        self._name = name

    @property
    def name(self):
        """this is just our previous, default behaviour"""
        return self._name

    @name.setter
    def name(self, name):
        """this is our brand new setter"""
        self._name = name
        print("you've just set a name to {}".format(self._name))  # log message

    @name.getter
    def name(self):
        """this is our brand new getter"""
        print("you've just got a name")  # log message
        return self._name

Let’s create an instance of this class:

me = SomeFolk('Tomek')

Here’s what happens when you get a name:

_some_variable = me.name

## you've just got a name

And when you set a name:

me.name = "tomis9"

## you've just set a name to tomis9

Magic.