[Python-Dev] pep8 reasoning

[Tim Golden]

On 25/04/2014 13:09, Chris Withers wrote:
> On 25/04/2014 04:03, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>> On Apr 25, 2014, at 12:00 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>>> Don't forget that PEP 8 is not the standard for the Python language,
>>> only the Python stdlib. Particularly, there's no strong reason to
>>> follow some of its lesser advices (eg spaces rather than tabs, the
>>> exact maximum line length) for new projects;
>>
>> I'd say it depends.  If the code is going to be shared with people
>> outside of
>> your organization (e.g. open source libraries), then there's a strong
>> motivation to be consistent throughout the community, which means PEP 8.
> 
> Right, so for me this means even in a private code base, there are big
> benefits to using PEP 8; everything looks the same, whether it's a third
> party library, python core or your own code...

I essentially had this conversation via my blog a couple of years ago:

  http://ramblings.timgolden.me.uk/2012/03/27/pep8-or-not/

  http://ramblings.timgolden.me.uk/2012/03/29/more-on-pep8/

  http://ramblings.timgolden.me.uk/2012/04/09/pep8-it-is-then/

and was quite surprised at the strength of feeling evoked. As you can
even tell from the titles of the posts, I ended up by accepting that,
even though I'm at liberty to apply my own format to my own code, it
would be more of a community-friendly idea to use [near-enough] PEP8
regardless.

As you can also see from the comments throughout, YMMV.

:)

TJG