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Style Guide |
We are, I hope, exiting an era in biological programming where the majority of code is written for one time use by a single individual, and entering an era of collaborative code development and publicly available open source scientific code. For this to become a meaningful reality our code needs to be readable and understandable by others. This requires consistent formatting of code in the same way that good communication requires proper formatting of text documents. Python has a recommended style guide to facilitate consistent code formatting of both the main text and doc strings. Participants in the classroom courses are expected to follow these style guides and those using this site are encouraged to do so in order to help improve the scientific discourse that occurs through programming. The Numpy docstring standards are more stringent and considered by many to be the standard for scientific software.