A first look at descriptors

First, we will explore the main idea behind descriptors to understand their mechanics and internal workings. Once this is clear, it will be easier to assimilate how the different types of descriptors work, which we will explore in the next section.

Once we have a general understanding of the idea behind descriptors, we will look at an example where their use gives us a cleaner and more Pythonic implementation.

The machinery behind descriptors

The way descriptors work is not all that complicated, but the problem with them is that there are a lot of caveats to take into consideration, so the implementation details are of the utmost importance here.

To implement descriptors, we need at least two classes. For this generic example, the client class will take advantage of the functionality we want to implement in the descriptor (this is generally just a domain model class, a regular abstraction we create for our solution), and the descriptor class...