pylint -- should I just ignore it sometimes?

Jean-Michel Pichavant jeanmichel at sequans.com
Thu Oct 21 11:20:54 EDT 2010


Mel wrote:
> 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.
>
>   

So If I get you right, because comments can lie, we should stop using 
comments ?
Computation never lies ? Well that's called a bug, and they are your 
every day worries.

Meaningfull names helps spotting miscomputation.

total_sales = some_computation()
How are you supposed to verify that some_computation is filling its role 
without even knowing what it is supposed to do ?

While I totally understand why some ppl prefer to use short names, I 
really don't see the point in saying that because any information can be 
wrong, we should stop giving any.

JM
 




More information about the Python-list mailing list