Recently I stumbled across an article talking about the importance of understanding type and object in Python, so thought of writing a small post on it.

Looking indepth, one may get the impression that this is more of a chicked-egg problem, but I’ll give an overall view of this.

- An object is basically an instance of type
- type is an instance of type itself
- object is the subclass of all other objects
- a type is an instance of object itself

So in a way, you have only two objects in Python, types and non-types.

Note: type can also be called class from Python >= 2.3

Well there you go. It wasn’t confusing now, was it ? :)