[reallydude]

> Internal state should be kept internal.

I'm not sure that's a proven model. It's a proposed model, for sure. Since you can't protect memory from runtime access, you can't really protect state, so it's a matter of convention which Python cleverly baked in (_privatevar access).

[DonaldPShimoda]

Ah sorry, I was speaking in the context of Kay's OOP! In retrospect my phrasing made it seem like I was stating an opinion as fact, but what I meant was just that Kay's OOP mandated that internal state could not be exposed and was very opinionated on the matter.