Python Tutorial: Conventions and PEP 8

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/software-engineering-for-data-scientists-in-python at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- Great work on those exercises. In our short time together we've seen how helpful the Python community can be. Not only have they provided some excellent packages for us to use, but they've also provided documentation to help us use them. Something you probably know from real life is that different cultures and communities follow different guidelines that help them run smoothly. For example, this can be seen in different greetings, depending on which community setting you're in it might make sense to say hello by shaking hands, bowing, or bumping fists. These unwritten rules are known as social conventions. The world of software engineering also has conventions that differ based on the language and community. Luckily for Pythonistas, these conventions aren't unwritten. We can turn to Python Enhancement Protocol 8, or PEP 8. PEP 8 is the defacto Style Guide for Python Code. It lets us know how to format our code to be as readable as possible, and to quote PEP 8, 'code is read much more often than it is written'. So readability is not something that should be overlooked. Let's see an example. Here we have some code that violates PEP 8 best practices. To put it simply, the code here is hard to the read. A few problems are: The module import isn't at the top of the file, the spacing and indentation is inconsistent, and the lack of line breaks makes it difficult to tell when one idea finishes and the next begins. Even without knowing the specific PEP 8 rules being broken, you can probably tell this isn't the most readable chunk of code. Let's see what the same chunk of code looks like after being rewritten to conform to PEP 8. Much better. By following the agreed-upon rules in PEP 8 and using whitespace appropriately, th