Writing clean, testable, high quality code in Python

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-cleancode/

by m3mb3r • 16 years ago

175 21 16 years ago

barnaby3• 16 years ago

Nice, this goes into some ground not covered in other python testing discussions. Great code examples. :-) These are the kinds of articles I come to hacker news to find.

yesno• 16 years ago

Let's hope that there will be more like this :).

phugoid• 16 years ago

If you have other (better) people poking around your code and giving you a hard time, you'll probably keep improving your strategy. But if you're working alone like I am, it's very important to land on articles like this.

barnaby3• 16 years ago

Very true, I've been in the working alone situation, and I think it led to some bad habits (then again, I've been in big corporations which led to even worse habits, so... yeah).

Garbage• 16 years ago

IBM has many quality articles, like this. Thanks for sharing.

grovulent2• 16 years ago

This is a really helpful article for me. I'm a programming newb and have been banging out ad hoc code for the last six months. Boy do I have some mega-functions. I've known enough to know that at some point this practice has to change, but I've been a bit stuck as to how to start making improvements. So I'm looking forward to working through this example.

Jach2• 16 years ago

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-4.html :)

grovulent2• 16 years ago

Thanks! Do you think it's really a good idea to be looking at LISP based stuff? I've barely begun to wrap my head around python.

deepu_2562• 16 years ago

Write tests, run code-coverage and code-smells. While good advice, that's just saying what to do. Not how to do. You can as well remove the word Python from the title and the advice holds true in general.

What i would like to see :- what in python we can use that will help us write quality, concise code. Things like using list comprehensions, using magic methods, higher order functions(decorators...) and may be something else that i didn't knew.

hessenwolf3• 16 years ago

Do you really think that list comprehensions and magic methods make code more readable, or did I read that the wrong way around?

deepu_2562• 16 years ago

They make code concise.List Comprehensions, magic methods - Yes . implementing __len__ on your class and using len() everywhere(with list, string and your new class) is better than coding a method called get_count() , total_count(), etc etc.

They help make code more declarative rather than filling it with implementation logic. Anyone can just read the code and understand it instead of getting bogged down with the implementation. Especially list comprehensions. [len(i) for i in k] is much better than reading a for loop implementation looping through k and append len of each object in the loop to a result array

bedroomfireflys• 16 years ago

IBM's just trying to get brownie-points with web developers because they know that they won't be around much longer.

barnaby3• 16 years ago

Au contraire IBM get it, they got on board with big industry trends a long time ago, and keep surviving (not thriving, mind you, but keeping up).

borism• 16 years ago

Not thriving? They're amazingly profitable as far as I know.

inovica• 16 years ago

I completely disagree. IBM really do "get it" - they are a company that quietly makes money as they're embedded into corporates, but they have a very open culture these days

hessenwolf3• 16 years ago

I would like to be able to share this, amiably, with a few of my colleagues and bosses who are not programmers, as we recently had to judge a $half-million piece of software with 2 600 line cashflow functions and I was the only one complaining.

But, yeah, look, the article is 'fine', but not much more, and very unfortunately.

Does anybody know of a similar article re modularisation with a more transparent example, and a more detailed transition between hypothesis and conclusion? He just seems to say 'less complexity', ???, 'profit'.

anthonyb• 16 years ago

s/\?\?\?/'Less time fucking around debugging stupid errors'/

stiff• 16 years ago

There is this "Working Effectively With Legacy Code" book by Michael Feathers that talks primarly about various ways of transforming very messy code to make it testable.

qjz• 16 years ago

I use a similar commenting style, but in addition to the description, arguments and returns, I also list globals used (if any) and side effects (even if none). I find it very helpful to show if a function depends on or alters state.

Writing clean, testable, high quality code in Python

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