pylint woes

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 4:42 AM, Michael Selik <michael.selik at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> +-------------------------+------------+
>> |line-too-long            |5           | meh
>>
>
> Yeah, I think 80 characters can be somewhat tight. Still, 5 long lines in
> 200ish lines of code? Sounds like you might be doing too much in those
> lines or have too many levels of indentation.
> "Sparse is better than dense"
> "Flat is better than nested"

Others have commented on this, but I'll weigh in with one point that
hasn't been mentioned yet. A lot of tools will complain when you
exceed 80 (or 79) characters per line; but it depends somewhat on *how
far* you exceeded it. Some people opt instead for a 100-character
limit, or even 120, but most programmers agree that a 200-character
line (or more!) is too long.

So if this is complaining about five lines out of your entire program
that just snuck over the 80-character limit (eg 86 characters long),
it's not a concern, and my recommendation would be to relax the
restriction. And if those few lines are ginormous hunks of data
(static list initialization, or something), you might consider dumping
them out to external files rather than wrapping them into big code
blocks. But if they're truly long lines of code, wrap or split them.

ChrisA