[Python-Dev] PEP 257 and __init__

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Mon Jan 4 02:49:32 EST 2016


On 4 January 2016 at 17:01, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> Ask the PSF/pypi people to either prohibit such names or require a
> disclaimer of some sort.  They are inherently confusing: "I took a look at
> pep008" does not mean that one even looked at the PEP.  Even when the
> context makes clear that the referent is the module, there is confusion as
> to its authoritativeness.  That Facudo would post here about the module's
> output illustrates that. To me, the name copying violates our informal
> trademark within Pythonland on 'PEP####'.

I don't think that's the right answer, as opinionated tools do serve a
useful purpose in preventing bikeshedding during code review (people
*expect* computers to be annoyingly pedantic, which frees up the human
reviewers to focus on higher level concerns). As projects evolve over
time, they may develop their own tweaks and customisations in their
style guide and switch to a more configurable tool, or they may not.

When some of the default settings for the pep8 utility became a
problem, I was able to talk to the developers and persuade them to
tune their defaults to be more in line with the actual PEP text, and
keep their extensions to optional settings.

A similar approach may work for PEP 257, by clarifying which aspects
tools should be leaving to human judgement (beyond the question of
whether or not to opt in to following PEP 257 at all - it's far less
universal than PEP 8).

Cheers,
Nick.

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


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