Thanks for the comment. You make some good points. I especially like the advice about using generators.

Certainly, my code could have been made better, and I’d have written it differently if going about it from scratch. But that wasn’t my point; my point was to argue against overuse of classes. I prefer making a narrow point (don’t overuse classes; do this instead) than a broad one (here’s some bad code; this is better). But that’s probably because I’m a bit simple minded.

I also think exploring code in a script is a fine alternative to the interpreter, especially if you know you want to end up with a module, but you’re just not sure yet what it should do. And especially if you’re writing unit tests in tandem.

Open your editor, and make like you were going to do everything with module level code, no functions or anything, and paste back and forth with the interpreter to see what you are dealing with.

You should end up with a file full of notes and python snippets that you can arrange it a reasonable structure to get your final code.

But you haven’t been nearly snooty enough. You should have gone all the way and written it using generators.

Generators are a convenient way to avoid deeply nested call graphs like main -> process_files -> process_file -> examine_workbook -> examine_sheet.

Rather, make each function a generator that yields the next stage’s arguments to its caller, and then and link the stages together in main.

For example, in process_file, there’s no need to configure examine_member. Rather, make process_file a generator that yields the file’s members to its caller, and the caller decides what function to use to process them.

This way, all the functions are independent of each other and can be understood and tested in isolation.

You’ve got a point about passing in the examine_member function as a parameter. I was assuming that being exploratory, the code would be evolving as it developed, so I made this as lightweight as possible. By the time I was ready to put this into a module, that would be one of the first refactorings I made.

BtW, I’d “configure” examine_member by having it be a parameter to process_file rather than being a global variable. But that’s probably a detail.