Development tools and practices for Pythonistas

[Ben Finney]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:

> As other people have said, version control is very handy. I use git
> myself, but imho the choice of _which_ VCS you use is far less
> important than the choice of _whether_ to use one.

True enough. But the modern crop of first-tier VCSen – Bazaar, Git,
Mercurial – are the ones to choose from. Anoyone recommending a VCS tool
that has poor merging support (such as Subversion or, heaven help us,
CVS) is doing the newcomer a disservice.

Learn the basics in all three of those, and learn one of them well. My
choice is Bazaar, because it has a very friendly command-line interface
and has excellent support for repositories created by all the others :-)

> def function(parms):
>     # TODO: This should check if Foo matches Bar and shortcut the computation
>     ...
>
> I have a very strict format: T, O, D, O, literal ASCII, always
> uppercase. Makes it easy to grep (and I try to avoid "todo" in
> lower-case, which means I can use a case-insensitive search if I
> choose).

Note that following that specific convention will match the default in
many programmers's text editors for highlighting those entries to bring
them to the programmer's attention. The defaults for PyLint also report
such comments in the code.

> Ultimately, it all comes down to discipline, and how important the
> project is to you. At work, I have a lot of disciplines; we have a
> wiki where stuff gets documented, we have source control, we have
> daily backups (as well), etc, etc, etc. For little home projects, it's
> not usually worth the effort. Take your pick, where do you want to go?

The two practices above – use a modern VCS, maintain TODO items such
that the computer can report them automatically – are so useful and so
inexpensive that I think anyone aspiring to become a good programmer is
foolish if they omit them on any project.

-- 
 \       “If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; |
  `\     but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.” —Donald |
_o__)                                             Robert Perry Marquis |
Ben Finney