[Python-Dev] Tweaking PEP 8 guidelines for use of leading underscores

[Nick Coghlan]

On 16 July 2013 13:02, Chris McDonough <chrism at plope.com> wrote:
> OSS developers have spent many months jumping through bw incompat hoops
> in Python over the last few years, and it has taken time away from doing
> things that provide value.  The less I can do of that, the better, and
> Python gets more value too.  That said, I realize that I'm in the
> minority because I happen to have a metric ton of public code out there.
> But it'd be nice if that was encouraged rather than effectively punished
> on the hunch that it might provide some benefit for a theoretical new
> user.

You, Armin and everyone else that works on the bytes/text boundary are
indeed the hardest hit by the Python 3 transition, and I appreciate
the hard work you have all done to help make that transition as
successful as it has been so far.

However, the fact that people abuse PEP 8 by treating it as "all
Python code in the world should follow these rules" cannot, and will
not, stop us from continuing to use it to set appropriate guidelines
*for the standard library*.

I'll look into adding some stronger wording at the top making it clear
that while PEP 8 is a useful starting point and a good default if a
project doesn't have a defined style guide of it's own, it is *not*
the be-all-and-end-all for Python style guides. Treating it as such as
an abuse of the PEP, pure and simple.

Cheers,
Nick.

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