Python 04: PEP8 Coding

hey what's going on everybody my name is John Hammond and welcome back to another YouTube video tutorial we're still looking at python uh we made a cool little thing here that actually doesn't do a whole lot but it's going over the basics conceptual stuff with input and output and variables and now we're going to move on this time around since we're starting to get into more actual cool and important and things programs that actually do stuff we're going to have to make sure our code is good we have to make sure our code is compliant with python standards and things like that so in Python there's this actual thing like that's called pep 8 it's the uh it's a standard and kind of a visual style guide that python has set out to make sure the python code that you write is pretty smart and I don't know similar to everything else that other people write so it discusses things about indentation discusses uh arguments uh how much how much spacing you should have between uh code how you should comment things and display variables etc etc I recommend you totally read through this but there is something that can kind of help our code be this way um so I'm going to actually run through a little presentation that was put together by Audrey Roy seems like a really awesome individual uh she was doing a bunch of cool stuff with python and this thing is on the Internet is a python tricks you can't live without and it's really about code readability style comments Etc and how to make your python code awesome clear and understandable um it really gets into self-documenting code um it really gets into making sure that you're documenting things with comments and Doc strings and it gets into the Zen of python 2 python is is something that's not only a programming tool but also a conceptual thing where you have a certain code style and I don't know a way of programming that is supposed to be great so I want to show this off this this module that keeps in mind Python's philosophy as you as you are a software developer and a software engineer so I'm going to fire that up in Idol uh just so it's a python interpreter that looks pretty good if you haven't heard of idol it is the integrated development learning environment I think for python uh if you don't have it installed you can pseudo app get install idle and then you should be able to install it just fine I've already have it installed so I'll fire it up and in inside idle we can import this the syntax that they're using right there just importing a module in Python and it tells us about the Zen of python beautiful is better than ugly explicit is better than implicit etc etc really just this philosophy and mindset that we should have when you're writing python code so to do that we want to be in line with that python pep8 standard pep eight really argues that you should have using four spaces no tabs blank lines etc etc ET so it's good to have all this stuff in the back of your mind but it would be pretty awesome if we had some tools that could make sure our python code does this just tools that automate the process for us like some plugins and Sublime Tex too let's check out and install this Sublime linter is apparently something that can do this for us we can install that package in Sublime Tex I just hit control shift p to get the command pallet up and then Sublime linter after I search for a package it should okay now it's just installed awesome so now in our python code sobl linter looks like it's already uh cranking stuff out for us it really hates all of my spaces so let's convert um looks like I can't find it in the menu as to how to convert our tabs to spaces but we should be able to do it in the command pallet yeah indentation convert to spaces and that works just fine for us um and all of these trailing stuff within parenthesis I shouldn't have because pep eight does not like that it wants to have all everything with inside parentheses sees it wants to have no spaces so okay Sublime lter looks pretty awesome for us and what else is there command line pep 8 Checker oh looks like that's just a tool pep bait we can probably set up and install if I actually look in our terminal it is something we can install from the repositories awesome so now that pep bait is available we can run that on the script that we just ran and we don't have any output or any errors so it looks like we're good pilent looks like it can do pretty similar stuff let's check that out pilent pilent on our variables oh wow this is really cool actually haven't seen this before inv valid constant name I wonder what all that stuff is checking line CES link variable names are well formed according to your colding standard this is really cool I actually haven't seen pilent before so this is definitely something to look into if you are interested in the kind of stuff that looks like it's given out invalid name huh what else is there and then the rest of this goes into important stuff that you can do with python that's pretty awesome um but I really wanted to show off the pep eight standard I really recommend you read through this um but the sublime lint uh package that we just installed looks like it'll be really awesome for us it'll make sure that the code that I write and also the code that you guys write is within the pep eight standard because actually I recorded a lot of these videos uh a while back and the standard that I use I had like really disgusting code BRAC that would represent like I actually commented out code code braces to represent my logic flow and I would end each line in Python with a semicolon which is just hideous no one liked it I got I got a lot of flag for it so I'm trying to do a lot better with this time around so having these tools like pep eight that command line utility and now pilent I want to look more into that and Sublime linter to keep things within the pep eight standard that should be pretty cool um and I hope you guys enjoy it and can actually follow along and use that same same tool with me so all right uh that's really all I want to show off in this tutorial nothing big but keeping track with that pep B standard and making sure the code that we write is within a certain compliant standard thing so yeah thanks for watching guys see you soon