I tend to do the same, some colleagues as well, so I guess this is some common pattern. The way I see it there are two schools: - The whitelist school: You wr

I tend to do the same, some colleagues as well, so I guess this is some common pattern. The way I see it there are two schools: - The whitelist school: You write everything without _ prefix, then you whitelist what you want accessible with __all__. - The explicit school: You forget about all and just use _ for symbols, modules, etc. I find the latter more readable and consistent (can be applied to attributes, free functions, modules...