On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 4:59 PM Steve Barnes <GadgetSteve@live.co.uk> wrote:
Can I suggest an addition to this discussion that the phrase: "Must adhere to python community guidelines" otherwise it is possible to be disrespectful, abusive, sexist, etc., while being clean and understandable (and even adhering strictly to Strunk & White). It is completely possible to be hateful in many ways while sticking to any grammatical rules. A possible example (taken from some real commercial code that the customer would be taking delivery of): "This function is a drop in replacement for the complete waste of space originally written by <anatomically accurate but improbable description> <full name of original coder>." - (when I found this in the code base I did manage to get it replaced but not without resistance from some parties).
Personally I think that community guidelines is better than trying to spell out what is unacceptable in a document such as PEP-8.
IMO the community guidelines are orthogonal to the style guide. You can be offensive while still maintaining the spacing, punctuation, and capitalization mandated by PEP 8, or you can be fully courteous in your language but mess up the style. People are expected to maintain both standards independently. I think there's a level of "formality" or "professionalism" that is expected (or presumed) here, but I don't know any easy way to define it. How do you say "comments have to use precise English" without the metaproblem of the expectation being itself imprecise? ChrisA