Noob question: Is all this typecasting normal?

[Ben Finney]

s0suk3 at gmail.com writes:

> On Jan 2, 7:20 pm, Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au>
> wrote:
> > They don't need to be creative; they merely need to conform with
> > the naming scheme as laid out in the PEP.
> 
> If it's something to be included in the standard library, I agree
> (just for consistency, not because using_underscores is better).
> 
> But for user code, I prefer mixedCase.

That seems superficially like an easy distinction. Indeed, PEP 8
explicitly is meant to apply only to code intended for inclusion in
the Python standard library.

But consider:

Python libraries generally don't get into the standard library until
they've had a history of widespread public use as an external library.
This helps ensure many of the harder-to-find wrinkles get discovered
through wide exposure and ironed out before becoming standard.

Code bases, especially library interfaces, that get a lot of use
across wide communities are naturally going to have a whole lot of
other people's code directly using those interfaces.

Interfaces that are so widely used garner a high resistance to change,
especially for something as non-functional as a naming convention.

Choosing the naming convention for one's code is much easier to do
when its usage base is smaller than when that base is larger.
Therefore the easiest time to choose when to code in conformance to
PEP 8 is right at the start.


The best conclusion I can come to from this? Unless you explicitly
*never* intend sharing your code with *anyone*, it's best to code all
your Python code in accordance with PEP 8 anyway. You then don't have
to make the decision about whether this is the time to follow PEP 8 or
not; just do it by default, and you avoid the needless pain on those
occasions, often unforeseeable at the start, where your code later
ends up widely used.

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Ben Finney