As known by every decent computer scientist ever, good coding style is
fundamental. It is specially important when someone has to mark your code. To
help yourself write pretty Python code, I recommend the package flake8, that
you can easily pip inside your virtual environment:
pip install flake8
Now you can run the command flake8 on any Python script and it will tell you
where and why it looks ugly, according the the world-famous PEP8 Style
Guide. PEP8 is a standard of good coding practice and should be respected,
particularly in collaborative projects.
That said, I politely disagree with some of the conventions in PEP8, and I have deliberately chosen to not follow them in the exercise scripts. These are the specific PEP8 sections I respectfully ignore:
Disclaimer: all the lines below start with "I" because it's all my personal preference. But those are like opinions --- everybody has one. You don't have to stare at mine for any longer than you deem appropriate.
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I prefer indentations with 2 spaces rather than 4.
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I think it's a good idea to leave an empty line at the end of a script.
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I'm ok with leaving extra spaces at the sides of operators to align several statements.
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I tend to begin code "sections" with double-hashed comments, i.e. coments starting with '## '. This disagrees with the PEP8 mantra that forces all comments to start with '# '.
To stop flake8 from complaining all the time about these, I style-check my python scripts with the following command:
flake8 myFancyScript.py | grep -Ev 'E221|E111|E265|W391'
Some marks of the assessed coursework are reserved for style and clarity. We won't strictly enforce all PEP8 guidelines, but it's probably a good idea to try to follow it.