Write Pythonic Code Like a Seasoned Developer Transcripts
Chapter: Style guidance from PEP 8
Lecture: Who decides what is Pythonic?
Login or
purchase this course
to watch this video and the rest of the course contents.
0:01
Are you ready to start looking at some Pythonic examples and writing some code? I sure am, we are going to start by focusing on PEP 8.
0:08
And some of the very basic structured ways in which you are supposed to write Python code, and then we'll quickly move beyond that
0:16
to more the patterns and techniques that we are going to talk about for the rest of class.
0:20
So one of the first questions about this idiomatic Python code, this Pythonic code, is "Who decides what counts as Pythonic and what doesn't?"
0:29
The way one person writes code may very well be different than the way another person likes to write code, and this is one of the reasons that exactly,
0:38
specifically stating what is Pythonic code and what does it look like is a challenge, but there is a couple of areas where we might take inspiration
0:44
and pull together some sources and find some consensus. One of them is just the community. We can look at blogs, Stack Overflow,
0:52
things like that and see what people are saying and what they agree or disagree upon. So, here is a question that asked what is Pythonic code
1:00
and there is some examples given. Another area that people take inspiration from is something called The Zen of Python,
1:07
and if you want to look at The Zen of Python, this is by Tim Peters you can just type import this inside of the REPL
1:12
in any version of Python and you'll get this, and it's things like "beautiful is better than ugly,
1:17
flat is better than nested, errors should never pass silently"; again, this is not super concrete
1:23
but it does give some sort of structure about what is important and what isn't. We also have PEP 8, Python Enhancement Proposal 8,
1:31
one of the very first official updates to the Python language was this thing called PEP 8 which is a style guide for Python.
1:39
Mostly this talks about the actual structure of your code, like "you should use spaces, not tabs", those types of things,
1:45
but it also has some guidance on patterns as well. We'll look at the few of the recommendations from PEP 8
1:51
before we move on to the more design/pattern/style recommendations.