Try something new or use what you know?

Good question. What would a software object do? Well, it will do what its creator tells it to do. And a software object knows only what its creator tells it. This doesn't seem right. What about the system in which the object lives? The system is alive and constantly changing state. Shouldn't the software object know about these changes?

Well, in some cases, they do. You pass external variables into your object by sending your object messages. This is the fancy term for "method invocation". Your object then has knowledge about its environment.

But what about your software object's attribute that are initialized during construction? Sometimes these values are hard-coded and can only be changed further down the lifeline of the object. Is this the best way to initialize attribute values? Or are we better off allowing for the possibility of dynamic attribute value initialization?

TurboGears allows developers to retrieve configuration values using a key. It also allows the developer to specify a default value should the key not exist. Using this feature, or a similar pattern for that matter, we can initialize attribute values by checking if there is something new that our software object didn't previously know about. If not, it will always use the specified default.