Best Practices for Internal Package Structure

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 6 Apr 2016 03:38 am, Sven R. Kunze wrote:

> On 05.04.2016 03:43, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> The purpose of packages isn't enable Java-style "one class per file"
>> coding, especially since *everything* in the package except the top level
>> "bidict" module itself is private. bidict.compat and bidict.util aren't
>> flagged as private, but they should be, since there's nothing in either
>> of them that the user of a bidict class should care about.
>>
>> (utils.py does export a couple of functions, but they should be in the
>> main module, or possibly made into a method of BidirectionalMapping.)
>>
>> Your package is currently under 500 lines. As it stands now, you could
>> easily flatten it to a single module:
>>
>> bidict.py
> 
> I don't recommend this.
> 
> The line is blurry but 500 is definitely too much. Those will simply not
> fit on a 1 or 2 generous single screens anymore (which basically is our
> guideline).

Are you serious that you work under the restriction that the entire file
must fit on a single screen? Or at most two pages?

So basically you've moved the burden of scrolling up and down a single file
to find the code you want into searching through the file system to find
the code that you want. I don't see this as an advantage. 


> The intention here is to always have a bit more of a full 
> screen of code (no wasted pixels) while benefiting from switching to
> another file (also seeing a full page of other code).

I don't understand this benefit. How does exceeding 1-2 pages of code in a
file prevent you from opening a second file in a separate window?

As we speak, I have 28 text editor windows open. Not all of them are Python
code, but among those which are, I have:

216 lines
157 lines
906 lines
687 lines
173 lines
373 lines
402 lines
6409 lines
509 lines
97 lines
163 lines
393 lines
1725 lines
25 lines

I have no problem with working with multiple file despite exceeding the
limit, so I don't understand the purpose of this guideline.


-- 
Steven