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Ask HN: Good Python codebases to read?

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Re: Ask HN: Good Python codebases to read?

#81

Post by maemre »

Myrmornis wrote: post #61
clinth wrote: post #4

Requests - https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests . How to make a usable api. The decisions that went into each method call were fantastic. Great test coverage as well. I use package in most python development.

requests is very useful, but it always gets mentioned as a good python codebase and I'm not sure I agree. One example: The first thing many users will do is requests.get? Which tells them that it takes some kwargs, but doesn't tell them what those kwargs are. It's easy, especially for a newcomer, to read "optional arguments that `request` takes" and fail to understand that they should look up the docs on (not-really-…

> requests.get?

I was using Python for 8 years and IPython for somewhat 5 years if my memory serves me right but today I have learned that you can invoke help on an object by appending '?'. I guess I might delve into IPython documentation sometime.

Thank you for lengthy and detailed explanation.

Re: Ask HN: Good Python codebases to read?

#82

Post by merlincorey »

aaronchall wrote: post #63
jonjacky wrote: post #54

Peter Norvig's examples. They are quite short and include much explanation in addition to code. They also include tests and benchmarking code. http://norvig.com/lispy.html http://norvig.com/lispy2.html (Lisp interpreter) http://www.norvig.com/spell-correct.html (Spelling corrector) http://norvig.com/sudoku.html (Sudoku solver) Also his online course Design of Computer programs includes many short, well-explained Pyth…

His coding style is not common to most writers of Python. He's using overly terse, poorly descriptive variable names, not using multiline strings for docstrings, not indenting where he should, and one-lining if/elif statements and function definitions. This style does not contribute to readability. This is not how I would want someone just learning Python to learn it.

Maybe it's because I am also something of a lisper (like Norvig), but I don't see anything wrong with inline ifs (after all, that is how if works in lisp, with returns for a conditional, like the ternary operator) or lambda functions. In fact, I find that improves readability dramatically because it more declaratively says what you are trying to accomplish in many cases.

For example:

  absolute_path = lambda path: path if path.startswith('/') else '/' + path
To me this is perfectly clearly a simple function whose only purpose is to prepend forward slashes to unix-style paths. Is the following really so much more readable?

  def absolute_path(path):
      if not path.startswith('/'):
          path = '/' + path
      return path
To my eyes and mind, the second example is not any more readable at the expense of several lines of code.

Re: Ask HN: Good Python codebases to read?

#83

Post by merlincorey »

Myrmornis wrote: post #74
jdiez17 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like you did the legwork of listing the params already, so you might as well send a PR with that docstring.

OK, maybe I will open an issue. The obvious concern is how to avoid duplicating the text among the various HTTP verb functions. In theory python allows the docstring to be manipulated via __doc__. However I don't think there is a precedent for using that mechanism to avoid duplication of docstring content that is considered good style, but perhaps someone could correct me if that is wrong.

You'd probably want to make a metaclass that handled the manipulation of __doc__ for shared verbs if you didn't want to duplicate the data too much.

Re: Ask HN: Good Python codebases to read?

#87

Post by dynamicdispatch »

feathj wrote: post #43

Check out boto. It's Amazon's official library for interacting with AWS. It is written and tested well. I use it every day. https://github.com/boto/boto

I've had to read the source of boto since there were some boto exceptions I was seeing in stack traces in the fabric deploy process - and ugh, I found the code to be not very intuitive and the documentation poor. Anyone else run into the same issues with boto?

Re: Ask HN: Good Python codebases to read?

#88

Post by spang »

aaronchall wrote: post #77
spang wrote: post #69

The Nylas Sync Engine is a large Python codebase with a test suite: https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine Lots of examples of SQLAlchemy, Flask, gevent, and pytest in action to build a REST API and sync platform for email/calendar/contacts data!

I clicked through on this and browsed a few directories, none of which seemed likely. I do not see any `.py` files aside from an empty `__init__.py` and the `setup.py`. Are you sure a beginner just learning Python should see this?

The main codebase is in `inbox/`, with launcher scripts and tools in `bin/`.

(Might not be totally obvious, because the package namespace is called `inbox/` for legacy reasons.)

If a beginner wants to see real production code, rather than toy examples, I think it's inevitable that there will be some points of confusion. Part of the learning process is diving in and exploring and being okay with not totally understanding everything that's going on. :)

Re: Ask HN: Good Python codebases to read?

#89

Post by aaronchall »

merlincorey wrote: post #82
aaronchall wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His coding style is not common to most writers of Python. He's using overly terse, poorly descriptive variable names, not using multiline strings for docstrings, not indenting where he should, and one-lining if/elif statements and function definitions. This style does not contribute to readability. This is not how I would want someone just learning Python to learn it.

Maybe it's because I am also something of a lisper (like Norvig), but I don't see anything wrong with inline ifs (after all, that is how if works in lisp, with returns for a conditional, like the ternary operator) or lambda functions. In fact, I find that improves readability dramatically because it more declaratively says what you are trying to accomplish in many cases. For example: absolute_path = lambda path: path…

The former is absolutely identical (semantically) to the latter, with two exceptions: 1) the former function does not know its own name and 2) the latter function can (and should) be documented with a docstring. I find the latter eminently more readable, and I work daily in a code base under development by 3000 Python developers for over 5 years.

Considering that the creator of the Python language considered getting rid of lambdas because they are essentially limited functions and thus violate Python's "one obvious way to do it" philosophy, I'd rather those learning Python to be shown the latter, rather than the former.

From a development and version control perspective, as soon as the lambda function requires more than a simple expression, i.e. a compound statement (https://docs.python.org/2/reference/compound_stmts.html), you have to trash the whole line, instead of adding perhaps a single extra line of content.

Re: Ask HN: Good Python codebases to read?

#90

Post by Kortaggio »

nyddle wrote: post #2

Flask - https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask . It's small, awesome and digestible.

Flask was the framework that finally made web frameworks "click" for me - the biggest advantage of learning about Flask is you can build up your knowledge of web services piece by piece, allowing you to take time and fully understand each component before moving on to the next. That way you're not trying to comprehend all the "magic" that's going on behind the scenes all at once.
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