Improving our coding conventions #133
Description
As we continue our development with Modmail, we should start paying more attention to the readability of our code, for topics such as:
- Code styles
- Conventions
- Improved doc-strings for functions (follow a doc string convention as well, ie. NumPy, Google)
- Type-hinting
According to the Zen of Python:
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than right now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
We should follow these inspirational words and bring them to Modmail.
I propose we follow PEP 8 (Python styling convention) and use a linter such as flake8 to moderate our codes. Let's start by making non-breaking changes to the existing codes to follow such styling guides.
Visit the cleanup branch to contribute.