[Python-ideas] gofmt for Python: standardized styling as a language feature

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 06:31:10PM +0000, Nicholas Chammas wrote:

> Additionally having a standardized style that can be *applied 
> automatically* makes whatever benefits of the style guide that much 
> more prevalent in the greater community and actually effective.

If you're talking about Gofmt and Gofix and enforcing PEP-8 rules for 
variable names, you're basically talking about refactoring tools, not 
merely source code reformatters. Do you have such tools you would like 
to propose for the standard library?

If you do have such tools, or would like to volunteer to write them, 
then they should spend some time as a third party project to knock the 
sharp edges off them. Once their usefulness is well-established and 
proven, and their API and featureset stable, then they can be proposed 
for the standard library.

Unlike Go-lang, which has the resources of Google behind it and can just 
pay some person or persons to work on this with as high a priority as 
Google wishes to give it, Python is reliant on volunteers. For major 
proposals like this, you're likely to get much more traction if you are 
volunteering yourself, rather than just hoping to convince somebody else 
to volunteer.

I think good refactoring tools for Python would be useful. I'm not 
volunteering to write them.



-- 
Steve