[Python-Dev] On breaking modules into packages Was: [issue10199] Move Demo/turtle under Lib/ (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Wed Oct 27 05:35:33 CEST 2010

On Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:46:15 -0400, Michael Foord wrote:

On 26/10/2010 15:05, R. David Murray wrote: > On Tue, 26 Oct 2010 10:39:19 -0700, Raymond Hettinger<raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote: >> If someone wants to reorganize code for clarity, I would prefer keeping >> it within one file, bringing related functions together and using >> comment lines to mark the major sections. ISTM, this is cleaner than >> introducing a new directory and having multiple files that cross-import >> one another. > +1 (or more) Really, you prefer to work in single multi-thousand line modules than cleanly split smaller packages? (Is that how you develop your own projects, out of interest?)

Yes.

Note that this is a more recent tendency, a few years ago I used to split things pretty finely right off the bat, but I found I wasted a lot of time on py-file interdependencies doing it that way.

Now I generally only split when the pieces end up generalized enough that I want to reuse them. Which, granted, is often enough. But what I'm doing in that case is moving code out of a file at the top level of my library....into a new file at the top level of my library.

Now, it's true that I haven't written any huge applications lately, but looking at a couple of typical projects the main files run between 1500 and 2000 lines (including comments), and I don't find those to be particularly big and certainly not awkward.

I do understand the attraction of putting "related stuff" into separate files. I just think the balance may have tilted too far in the direction of nested and could stand to be nudged back toward flat :)

Unittest is only 2600 lines total including comments. Typical file sizes are between 200 and 300 lines. Those feel tiny to me :)

(And email is worse...a number of files only have a single class in them, and some of those classes consist of maybe 20 lines...)

-- R. David Murray www.bitdance.com

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