[Python-Dev] Tweaking PEP 8 guidelines for use of leading underscores (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Jul 16 07:44:47 CEST 2013

On 16 July 2013 13:16, Chris McDonough <chrism at plope.com> wrote:

I understand that. Unfortunately the remainder of the world does not. The same IDEs that would be helped via this proposed change have "PEP8 modes" turned on by default! http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2013/02/long-awaited-pep-8-checks-on-the-fly-improved-doctest-support-and-more-in-pycharm-2-7/

It seems like an unwise step to continue stuffing things into the PEP8 brand bag as a result if that stuff is only meant to apply to the stdlib.

Clarifying what constitutes an internal interface in a way that doesn't require renaming anything is a necessary prerequisite for bundling or bootstrapping the pip CLI in Python 3.4 (as pip exposes its internal implemetnation API as "import pip" rather than "import _pip" and renaming it would lead to a lot of pointless code churn). Without that concern, the topic never would have come up.

Yes, this new section may give the PEP 8 prescriptivists more ammunition to complain about existing projects with different coding standards not complying with the latest standard library guidelines. We're not unfamiliar with the complaint, given the number of standard library modules (some dating from the 20th century) that don't comply with the current incarnation of PEP 8 circa 2013.

However, PEP 8 is already quite explicit about what we think of that kind of behaviour: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#a-foolish-consistency-is-the-hobgoblin-of-little-minds

PEP 8 is a tool. Like many of the other tools we provide as part of Python, it can be abused. However, the likelihood of such abuse is not an excuse to avoid using the tool appropriately, it's a reason to continue the thankless task of trying to educate people on what's appropriate and what isn't (and making wholesale changes to working code just to comply with a style guide generally isn't appropriate).

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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