[Python-Dev] Tweaking PEP 8 guidelines for use of leading underscores

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jul 16, 2013, at 04:10 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

>Yeah, we should probably be a bit more vocal in pointing out that PEP
>8 is something to be applied judiciously, *not* treated as "sacred
>writ, never to be questioned". It's very tempting to just sigh and
>ignore it, instead of explicitly pointing out the problems with taking
>it too literally for people's personal projects (or, worse, using it
>to abuse developers of projects that long predate the recommendations
>in more recent versions) :P

In my experience, most PEP 8 violation bugs that I see for various upstreams
(mine and others) comes from running the pep8 tool over the code.  A lot of
upstreams do this as part of their normal QA (e.g. you can set up unittests
that run pep8, pyflakes, and other linters).  Those will generally be fine
because they're already committed to conformance to pep8's notion of what PEP
8 says <wink>[1].

In other cases, Someone Out There runs pep8 over your code, and files bugs on
all the complaints that get produced.  That can definitely lead to churn and
waste, especially on big, established code bases.

-Barry

[1] which I do not always agree with anyway, as evidenced by the recent
discussion on closing paren indentation for multi-line collections.