[Python-Dev] Updating turtle.py (original) (raw)

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Mon Jun 2 11:17:37 CEST 2014

On 6/2/2014 3:12 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Even if we had unlimited reviewer resources (which we don't), mechanical code cleanups tend to fall under the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" guideline. That then sets us up for a conflict between folks just getting started and trying to be helpful, and those of us that are of the school of thought that sees a difference between "cleaning code up to make it easier to work on a subsequent bug fix or

In the case of turtle, Jessica said from the beginning that code cleanup would be for the purpose of understanding the code and making it easier to do bug fixes and enhancements.

feature request" and "cleaning code up for the sake of cleaning it up".

As you know, many outsiders think that we take PEP 8 more seriously than we do.

The latter is generally a bad idea, while the former may be a

good idea,

Lita seemed to quickly understand that being able to test a bug fix is more important than making it look pretty. In any case, I believe she is doing something else until we hear from Gregor or otherwise decide how to proceed with turtle.

but it can be hard to explain the difference to folks that are more familiar with code bases started in the modern era where the ability to easily run automated tests and code analysis on every commit is almost assumed, rather than being seen as an exceptional situation.

-- Terry Jan Reedy

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