pylint -- should I just ignore it sometimes?

Jean-Michel Pichavant jeanmichel at sequans.com
Fri Oct 22 09:34:08 EDT 2010


Seebs wrote:
> On 2010-10-21, Jean-Michel Pichavant <jeanmichel at sequans.com> wrote:
>   
>> It can be short if descriptive:
>>     
>
>   
>> for o, c in cars:
>>     park(o)
>>     phone(c)
>>     
>
>   
>> for owner, car in cars: # by just using meaningful names you give the 
>> info to the reader that you expect cars to be a list of tuple (owner, car)
>>     park(owner)
>>     phone(car) # see how it is easier to spot bug
>>     
>
> In this case, yes.
>
> The one that brought this up, though, was "except FooError, e:", and in
> that case, there is no need for any further description; the description
> is provided by the "except", and "e" is a perfectly reasonable, idiomatic,
> pronoun for the caught exception.
>
> -s
>   

same for the exception.

Let's say you're reading some code, someone else code. You can't just 
read  everything so you're reading through quickly.

You first hit that line:

"print e"

You have *no* idea what e could be. It could be the number e... You can 
now try to read through the above code and find out. And it's easy to do 
that, Anyone can do that. But it takes time ! only 1 sec maybe but 
that's still 1 sec, and when you are reveiewing code, it can be really 
tedious.

Immagine now you hit
"print exception".
Then you know, he's trying to print an exception, do you need to care 
about that ? If so introspect the code, try to know wich exception 
class, but if the answer is 'I don't care about the exception being 
printed' you can just continue and read the code like a book :) It saves 
a lots of time.


Regarding another point you mentioned in this thread, your brain can 
read "number" as fast as "num" so it doesn't take more time to read 
proper english, than abreviations all around (I think it's the opposite 
actually).

Your brain can instantly recognize a known face while it take a huge 
amount of computation for a CPU to do so.
All I'm saying is that the brain is not reading a sequence of letters, 
but recognize some known pattern as a whole, so reading time is not 
related the word length.

JM




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