Spacing conventions

[Tim Golden]

> On 27/09/17 09:50, Bill wrote:
>> If you are teaching beginning students, do you expect them to try to
>> follow these sorts of conventions?  Is it perfectly fine to let
>> "taste" guide you (I'm just trying to get a feel for the philosophy
>> here)?   

I few years ago I wrote a few short blog posts about my own preferences 
which contrasted with the PEP8 standard:

http://ramblings.timgolden.me.uk/2012/03/27/pep8-or-not/
http://ramblings.timgolden.me.uk/2012/03/29/more-on-pep8/
http://ramblings.timgolden.me.uk/2012/04/09/pep8-it-is-then/

The upshot was that, although I preferred my own style, I recognised the 
benefit of using a common standard -- although without being slavish to it!

FWIW I'd already been programming Python for some years when I wrote 
those posts: I wasn't just someone who'd discovered the language and had 
no idea about its conventions.

I think with a few more years of experience, both in Python and in other 
(mostly SQL) coding, a point I'd make is that having a common standard 
reduces cognitive jarring -- it reduces one small barrier to 
understanding someone else's code.

Of course, within any organisation, you can achieve that without using 
Python's own convention, but my final decision was that following the 
more universal Python convention was worthwhile for essentially the same 
reason.

TJG