as we saw in objects in pythonwe can do this easily by just setting phone attribute on the contact after it is constructed but if we want to make this third variable available on initializationwe have to override __init__ overriding means altering or replacing method of the superclass with new method (with the same namein the subclass no special syntax is needed to do thisthe subclass' newly created method is automatically called instead of the superclass' method for exampleclass friend(contact)def __init__(selfnameemailphone)self name name self email email self phone phone any method can be overriddennot just __init__ before we go onhoweverwe need to address some problems in this example our contact and friend classes have duplicate code to set up the name and email propertiesthis can make code maintenance complicated as we have to update the code in two or more places more alarminglyour friend class is neglecting to add itself to the all_contacts list we have created on the contact class what we really need is way to execute the original __init__ method on the contact class this is what the super function doesit returns the object as an instance of the parent classallowing us to call the parent method directlyclass friend(contact)def __init__(selfnameemailphone)super(__init__(nameemailself phone phone this example first gets the instance of the parent object using superand calls __init__ on that objectpassing in the expected arguments it then does its own initializationnamelysetting the phone attribute note that the super(syntax does not work in older versions of python like the [and {syntaxes for lists and dictionariesit is shorthand for more complicated construct we'll learn more about this shortly when we discuss multiple inheritancebut know for now that in python you would have to call super(emailcontactself__init__(specifically notice that the first argument is the name of the child classnot the name as the parent class you want to callas some might expect alsoremember the class comes before the object always forget the orderso the new syntax in python has saved me hours of having to look it up