My Python Code Looks Ugly and Confusing – Help!

Key Takeaways

hey everyone it's dan Bader here and a common complaint that I see from new Python developers or those Python developers who want to take their skills to the next level boils down to saying my Python code looks ugly and it's confusing how can I fix it and there is a couple of ways you can move past that barrier and get better at coding Python and I want to show you one that I've seen work very effectively over and over again and it is using a Python code linter and there's exactly one that it would recommend very much called flake eight because it's a combination of a static analysis tool that you know is going to call you out on some just plain bugs in your Python code and also a Python code style checker which is going to call you out on formatting inconsistencies and just things that are ugly or confusing about your code so I've got a little example here and we can look at this and say okay you know it looks kind of decent like what's run it um creates two random numbers multiplies them seems to work awesome let's ship it but when we actually you know try and read this file look at this it just looks hilariously ugly it is really inconsistent like we're you know doing these things we're importing more than one module per line then the formatting is not consistent we're using different indentation levels we're actually creating this variable here that we're not using there's all these random spaces that shouldn't be here it just kind of seems just really ugly and not very organized now the good news is that there's actually a tool that can help you with these problems and it's called flake eight so let's go ahead and install it right now using pip we're just going to go pip install flake eight run this and once it's done we have a new command available called flake eight and we're just going to run this on our example python file and just like that it's detecting a whole bunch like a whole list of things that are just weird or odd or plain wrong about our code and if you've got your terminal set up correctly and I've got another video that shows you how to do that you can actually click these recommendations and jump directly to that line in your editor so here in the first line flake eight is complaining that we're importing cysts but we're not using it so we want to get rid of Sis here right and then it also complaints about the fact in the same line that we're using multiple imports on one line so again this should be split up and it's finding all these other problems like we're not spacing our functions apart we're using inconsistent indentation and all of these things now this is pretty usable by itself right you might as well run this tool like go and run this tool right now in any Python program you've ever written and you're going to learn tons and I promise it's going to make you a better Python programmer now the other thing you can do is actually integrate flake eight directly with your editor I personally I really like sublime text so I've got this set up here where every time I save a file it runs flake eight and it gives me feedback on my code and I think this is really the secret to moving past that stage where we're you're writing in consistent code that is not formatted correctly and you catch yourself making all these tiny little bugs in your in your day to day work right this can really help you with that because it makes it extremely easy to avoid these mistakes right we can just get rid off these unused imports and then here we want two spaces according to pepp eight here for example you can see that the indentation isn't right now if I run flake eight again I'll actually see that we're creating this variable this local variable that we're not using so let's get rid of it um add some more spaces here all right we've got some inconsistent formatting here as well so let's fix that again same thing here and that's probably complaining because we have too many extra spaces in here and all of a sudden this whole thing just became a lot easier to read and it still works so if you're interested in getting your sublime text set up in a way where it gives you that feedback on your code I wrote a step-by-step guide book that you can find at sublime text Python comm but that shameless plug aside I think for every Python program are watching this right now go and install flake eight this is the tool that I would recommend there's a couple more like pile inter and but flake eight will get you started it is very easy to use it is low and false positive so you will most of the time only call out things are actually just plain wrong or ugly in in the Python coded checks so I've personally seen great results from using flake eight and just getting that constant automatic feedback I've seen great results and co-workers and pretty much anyone I ever talked to and recommended this tool to so go and check it out I absolutely love flake eight and I think it's going to make you a better Python programmer in the shortest amount of time possible all right thanks for listening and good with setting everything up