Introduction

Example Code

  • No one writes readable, well designed and well formatted code all the time
  • Writing clear and readable code helps others - as well as yourself in the future - to understand, modify and extend your code more easily
  • A code smell is a cursory indication that a piece of code may have underlying issues

Analysing Code using a Linter

  • Virtual environments help us maintain dependencies between different code projects separately, avoiding confusion between which dependencies are strictly required for a given project
  • One method to create a Python virtual environment is to use python -m venv venv to generate a virtual environment in the current directory called venv
  • Code linters such as Pylint help to analyse and identify deeper issues with our code, including potential run-time errors
  • Pylint outputs issues of different types, including informational messages, programming standards violations, warnings, and errors
  • Pylint outputs an overall score for our code based on deductions from a perfect score of 10

Advanced Linting Features

  • Use the --reports y argument on the command line to Pylint to provide verbose reports
  • Instruct Pylint to ignore messages on the command line using the --disable= argument followed by comman-separated list of message identifiers
  • Use pylint --generate-rcfile > .pylintrc to generate a pre-populated configuration file for Pylint to edit to customise Pylint’s behaviour when run within a particular directory
  • Pylint can be run on the command line or used within VSCode
  • Using Pylint helps us keep our code consistent, particularly across teams
  • Don’t use Pylint feedback and scores as the only means to judge code quality