pylint -- should I just ignore it sometimes?

[Mel]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Oct 2010 12:49:47 +0000, Neil Cerutti wrote:
> 
>> _The Practice of Programming_ has this right. In general the bigger the
>> scope of a variable, the longer and more descriptive should be its name.
>> In a small scope, a big name is mostly noise.
> 
> Thank you! The scope of the variable is an important factor.

Wittgenstein remarked somewhere* "...it is the particular use of a word only 
which gives the word its meaning...".  For a variable, if you can see the 
entire use at a glance, then any other cues to its meaning, like a long 
variable name, are redundant.

Long variable names can lie; they share this ability with comments.  The one 
study** I've seen of newbie errors observed the #1 error being as assumption 
that descriptive variable names could somehow replace computation, e.g. that 
if you called a variable "total_sales", then accessing it would get you a 
sales total, regardless of what you might or might not write as 
computational statements.

	Mel.

* "somewhere" hah! I covertly looked it up.  It's in the _Blue and Brown 
Books_.

** This I haven't looked up.  It got some publicity a year or so ago.  It 
started when somebody gave a mid-term computer science test to a class who 
had only just started the course.  Then they studied the results to find out 
what the students might have been thinking.