Thanks for answering! I have no idea why someone downvoted your reply. *People: ...

nakkiel · on March 19, 2012

I work in a place where people don't use spaces and don't use empty lines to separate logical groups of lines. It's a real pain for me who is a code format junkie as our code ends up being an ugly pack of unrelated crap that's really hard to read.

It's Python code and I find it uglier than some fairly large C++ project I used to work on.

Anyway, I wish there was a gofmt in Python because at least, I'd drop all hopes of forging my own rules (silly junkies) and some basic clarity would be forced into our codebase.

I know there are beautifiers but when such things are enforced and not negotiable, it's just so much simpler and people just stop caring as well.

cageface · on March 19, 2012

It's Python code and I find it uglier than some fairly large C++ project I used to work on.

I've always argued that if your team can't bother to even indent code properly than you have much bigger problems than any language formatting rules can solve.

scott_w · on March 19, 2012

One time we worked on some code, and one of the developers had the same habit: "It works, so why do I need to format it?"

We decided to make our build system run PEP over the code, resulting in a failure if PEP didn't pass.

It annoyed the hell out of him, but we quickly got the formatting up to a better standard.

Luyt · on March 19, 2012

PEP8? http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/

scott_w · on March 20, 2012

My apologies, yes. Don't know why I missed the 8 off there.

FreakLegion · on March 19, 2012

I completely support enforced style -- it's part of what I love about Python and F#'s light mode -- but it has to be the right style.

I strongly believe that code should look like a screenplay, not a novel. More white space, in other words, is rarely a bad thing. Inline braces decrease white space and make unfamiliar code harder to scan, so to me they're Not Good.

Also wow, I didn't know it was even possible to write Python without spaces. Are we talking no spaces in arguments, like

    def func(arg1,arg2):
        print "Indented"
        return

or full-on no spaces?

    def func(arg1,arg2):
    print "Not indented"
    return

I thought the latter was prohibited.

nakkiel · on March 20, 2012

Sorry, we are talking about that:

    def func(arg1,arg2):
        i=other_stuff(1,2,3,4,56,43,234+4*3)
        return i

ma2rten · on March 19, 2012

Don't want to make this a big meta discussion, but I noticed that often the best comments are downvoted first, and eventually end up on the the top of the page. Don't worry this type of thing corrects itself.