issue_comments: 259270684

Python's introspection capabilities are powerful enough that users can find out such information.

I don't really agree here. Code is read in text form more often than it is interactively explored.

At Google, our Python style guide actually prohibits writing import like from xarray import Dataset. You have to write import xarray or import xarray as xr and always use the namespace.

And then there"s also the problem of accessors not being usable in functional programming paradigms.

xarray objects are already non-threadsafe, in the same way that the built-in list and dict are not threadsafe. I don't see how caching attributes changes this. You can choose whether or not to save state on the accessor (and of course, generally it would be better not to).

Finally, I'll note that we also have the .pipe method (e.g., array.pipe(square)), so if you just want functions that you can call with method chaining syntax, you don't even need to write an accessor at all.

You are certainly welcome to monkey patch -- that's the Python philosophy, after all -- but I'm not going to recommend it or make it easy. But I would even subclassing before considering monkey patching -- at least then your methods are contained to your own code, instead of contaminating a global namespace.