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

Barry Warsaw barry at python.org
Tue Jul 16 17:26:55 CEST 2013

On Jul 16, 2013, at 04:10 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Yeah, we should probably be a bit more vocal in pointing out that PEP 8 is something to be applied judiciously, not treated as "sacred writ, never to be questioned". It's very tempting to just sigh and ignore it, instead of explicitly pointing out the problems with taking it too literally for people's personal projects (or, worse, using it to abuse developers of projects that long predate the recommendations in more recent versions) :P

In my experience, most PEP 8 violation bugs that I see for various upstreams (mine and others) comes from running the pep8 tool over the code. A lot of upstreams do this as part of their normal QA (e.g. you can set up unittests that run pep8, pyflakes, and other linters). Those will generally be fine because they're already committed to conformance to pep8's notion of what PEP 8 says [1].

In other cases, Someone Out There runs pep8 over your code, and files bugs on all the complaints that get produced. That can definitely lead to churn and waste, especially on big, established code bases.

-Barry

[1] which I do not always agree with anyway, as evidenced by the recent discussion on closing paren indentation for multi-line collections.

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