Python Best Practice Patterns

Re:Python Best Practice Patterns by SoftwareMaven on Friday February 28, 2014 @03:24PM (#7321222)

Having gone through a couple thousand lines of Javascript that adhered to the "keep methods small", I call bollocks on that. Make methods as big as they need to be.

    function doFooOnList(l) {
        for (var i=0; i<l.length; i++) {
            doFoo(l[i]);
        }
    }
    function doFoo(i) {
        i.foo();
    }

gets old, very quickly.

After designing and building code for 20+ years, I can comfortably say that there are no arbitrary rules of software design, and some of the worst code I've seen has been a result of following "best practices" instead of thinking for oneself.

Write code like it is meant to be read, because that's what happens most often.

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Re:Python Best Practice Patterns by gnaritas on Friday February 28, 2014 @04:49PM (#7321743)

> Make methods as big as they need to be.

Correct, and if you do that, methods will invariably end up small. What you cite above is small no matter how you write it, so that's not the point of the advice to keep methods small. Methods pretty much never need to be long; they're long because they're poorly written code. Well written code tends towards small methods.

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Re:Python Best Practice Patterns by Silhouette on Saturday March 01, 2014 @07:35AM (#7324044)

Correct, and if you do that, methods will invariably end up small.

If you'd said "usually", I'd have agreed with you, but "invariably" is far too strong. Sometimes the logic you need to implement is fundamentally complicated, and so the code you write to implement it must inevitably be at least that complicated. If that means writing a 100 line function, but the function really is doing one job, at one level of abstraction, in a cohesive way, then so be it.

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Re:Python Best Practice Patterns by gnaritas on Saturday March 01, 2014 @01:31PM (#7325448)

We agree, I'm fine with usually.

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Re:Python Best Practice Patterns by mercurial on Friday February 28, 2014 @05:13PM (#7321907)

"Small" obviously depends on your language, but well-named methods which follow the "do one thing and do it well" principle always win over wall-of-text code. It's all a matter of decomposing the issue, finding the level of abstraction your method will work at, and naming things.

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Re:Python Best Practice Patterns by gnaritas on Friday February 28, 2014 @05:24PM (#7321953)

We agree completely.

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Re:Python Best Practice Patterns by userbinator on Friday February 28, 2014 @11:24PM (#7323085)

some of the worst code I've seen has been a result of following "best practices" instead of thinking for oneself.

Very very true. This phrase suggests there is no better way to do something, and that it should always be used because it is "best", and the dogmatic application of rules replaces actual thought and understanding. I am not against a "recommendation" or "suggestion", but to call it "best practice" is cargo-cult-like.

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Re:Python Best Practice Patterns by nine_k on Friday February 28, 2014 @03:30PM (#7321264)

`for (var i=0; i<l.length; i++)` is so 1970. In Javascript, you have array.map and $.each, and can define functions in-place.

Same applies to Python, BTW; get used to list comprehensions and generators and you cannot look back.

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Re:Python Best Practice Patterns by pekk on Friday February 28, 2014 @03:54PM (#7321423)

These aren't supported everywhere in javascript.

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Re:Python Best Practice Patterns by nine_k on Friday February 28, 2014 @04:36PM (#7321663)

jQuery or underscore provide them on every sane JS platform. These are not hard to write by hand, too.

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Re:Python Best Practice Patterns by hiisi on Saturday March 01, 2014 @02:49AM (#7323566)

I'd say methods should be small enough so that their intent is clear. Usually it means that methods should have exactly one responsibility, otherwise they seem bloated.

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Re:Python Best Practice Patterns by jcampbell1 on Friday February 28, 2014 @03:30PM (#7321262)

You are calling bollocks on a claim he doesn't make.

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