[Chicago] Google Python Style Guide

[Joe Jasinski]

Hey Augie,
  Just joined the ChiPy mailing group.  Saw your name. How's life been?  I
assume you are in the city?
Joe

On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 9:03 PM, Augie Fackler <lists at durin42.com> wrote:

>
> On Sep 19, 2009, at 7:09 PM, Martin Maney wrote:
>
>  On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 04:29:40PM -0500, Brian Ray wrote:
>>
>>> Heh, this is really funny... it is like  super charged PEP8.
>>>
>>
>> With simple yet amusing in-page widgets to "reveal details"!
>>
>> Really, I came across very little that made me say "uhm, wait".  One
>> that comes to mind, perhaps because I'd just violated it earlier today,
>> was the IMO over-strict one about limiting list comprehensions.  I do
>> not for a moment think that
>>
>>   result.extend('%s %s' % (p, s) for p in prefixes for s in tails)
>>
>> would be improved in any reasonable way by unrolling it into multiple
>> lines, yet the rule says Only One Iterable Is Allowed.
>>
>
> Come at it as a C++ or Java programmer though - most projects at Google use
> Java and C++ primarily, and last I knew the majority of Googlers only know
> Python at the level of having read _Python in a Nutshell_ on the shuttle to
> work. The list comprehension is something that a lot of people have a little
> trouble with if they're coming to Python as an nth programming language.
> I'll confess I found it non-intuitive (and a little confusing) at first.
>
>  I think they've
>> just chosen a 90% right condition and turned it into a too-rigid rule
>> that has obvious failings.  Of course, the intent - don't write overly
>> involved list comprehensions -  is one with which I agree.
>>
>
> The point is that you might write a service in Python which some other poor
> sucker^W^W engineer will have to use, and if it acts oddly, he might need to
> be able to read the source. He still has to be able to parse your code if
> he's not fluent in the nuances of your language. The price for that is that
> you neuter some of the more useful features of the language.
>
> Then again, my worst single piece of Python comes from abusing map, reduce,
> and list comprehensions. I think it's the single feature of the language
> which requires the most restraint.
>
>  Another issue they've made me think about is importing non-module
>> objects.  "from xyz import *" is easy to argue against, but I was
>> surprised to see the rule (1) "Use imports for packages and modules
>> only."  I'll concede that Google probably has more experience than I do
>> about large code bases with many different people working on them, but
>> I can't see what the problem is here, unless they're in the habit of
>> shuffling functions or classes about from one place to another with gay
>> abandon.  (I will say that the sort of thing I use from ... import
>> x,y,z with is mostly framework-ish stuff that gets used over and over
>> in some files, such as Django's Model class and field types, and that
>> may be partly because so many of them have long-enough names as it is)
>>
>
> When you're looking at a 1000 line file (sadly, not uncommon), it's nice to
> know that the function that just got used is really an import from another
> module (because it has a foo. prefix) and that you should go look in another
> file instead of scrolling around wildly or searching for "def ..." looking
> for a function when it might be a class (this has happened to me even in
> small codebases) gets tedious.
>
>
>> Style guides: the biggest, most in need of painting, bikesheds ever! :-)
>>
>
> Indeed!
>
>
>  (1) I still find that terse, not clear.  The expansion makes it clear:
>> "Use import x for importing packages and modules. Use from x import y
>> only when x is a package and y is a module."
>>
>> --
>> vi is a microcosm of the Unix world.  Don't expect
>> to learn all of it at once; perhaps you shouldn't expect
>> to learn all of it at all.  -- Jon Lasser (Think Unix)
>>
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>>
>>
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>



-- 
Joe J. Jasinski
www.joejasinski.com
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