Why is the keyword class hierarchy flat?

Wed 08 Mar 2023

In developing jschon, I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from two great Python libraries that I use extensively in my day job: Pydantic and SQLAlchemy.

Applications that use Pydantic or the ORM paradigm in SQLAlchemy are easy to spot: you’ll find a collection of declarative models, each derived from a quintessential base class provided by the library - BaseModel in Pydantic, DeclarativeBase in SQLAlchemy. A given application might define a model hierarchy to roll up common behaviours, but that would be private to the application and, in general, should not affect the relationships between the declarative models and other foundational entities in the library. One of the great things about implementing declarative models using these libraries is that I know that I can just derive from BaseModel or DeclarativeBase, I don’t have to know which is the most appropriate abstract subclass to use, and I don’t need to be aware of any variance in implementation higher up in the hierarchy. Another great thing is that each model is completely self-contained and completely self-descriptive.

In jschon, keywords are analogous to declarative models, with Keyword being the quintessential base class. One might argue that declarative models are conceptually more analogous to schemas, and model fields to keywords, but I’m looking at things from a programming workflow perspective: as declarative models are the building blocks of a Pydantic / SQLAlchemy application, so keywords are the building blocks of a vocabulary implementation. Taking the analogy further, a given vocabulary might define a keyword class hierarchy to roll up common behaviours, but that should be private to the module, extension or application that implements the vocabulary, and should not affect the underlying relationships between keywords and other foundational entities in the jschon library. From the perspective of those other entities, a keyword is a keyword is a keyword, and from the perspective of the vocabulary, a keyword is self-contained and self-descriptive.

marksparkza