[Tutor] Good Taste Question: Using SQLite3 in Python

[Alan Gauld]

On 30/04/15 20:22, Roel Schroeven wrote:
> Alan Gauld schreef op 2015-04-30 00:51:

> Summarizing a bit, I think you make two main points (please correct me
> if I'm wrong):

Your quite correct.

I'm probably a bit paranoid but as I said I spent a
significant bit of my production-programming career
(about 40%) on maintenance projects and I've seen the
horrors that come from uninitialised variables, misused
names etc etc. And any kind of meaningless symbiol
(even if the meaning is not needed at the time).
And in a maintenance team where you are targetted
to fix, say, 4 bugs per day, a "horror" is anything
that adds more than say 15-20 minutes to the process!

> [1] Visually scanning for _ or __ is hard, and _ are __ hard to
> distinguish from each other.
>
> Personally, I find it easy to scan for them, but I think I can see whee
> you're coming from. Python tends to prefer words and tends to dislike
> symbols

Yes but worse in this cae is tat Python uses __ for special
purposes so if there is a __ near to a variable name the reader
is likely to assume its just a pre-pended dunder marker rather
than a separate name. It also makes searching for dunders harder
since there are likely to be quite a few in the code already.
(yes you can create a regex search but making it reliable
is quite tricky.)

> [2] Inevitably, sooner or later someone somewhere will start using _ or
> __ despite the fact that by convention they should not be used.
>
> I have to admit that I have no experience programming in larger teams,
> and was blissfully unaware of the problems you describe.

Again my experience is not typical of the tutor forum, but
some tutor readers may go on to bigger things and bad habits
once learned become permanent...

My smallest project team was 7  programmers producing 80,000
lines of code. Next smallest 18, producing 250,000.
Most of my projects have had over 100 programmers and several
million LOC (usually C++ or COBOL)

One project had over 1000 programmers and produced 60 million
LOC using 7(?) different programming languages. (I ran one of
the maintenance teams of ~10 coders all fresh from  uni')

Like I say I get paranoid about some things :-)


-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
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