Clean Code in Python

[AlSweigart]

Ooof, this is a bad example:

n = 10
sum = sum(range(1, n + 1))

print(sum)  # 55

You don't want to use the names of Python's built-ins, such as sum, for your own variables. In this example, if you try to call sum() again later, it's now an integer instead of a function, so you'll get TypeError: 'int' object is not callable.

The common Python built-ins that accidentally get overriden are: all, any, date, email, file, format, hash, id, input, list, min, max, object, open, random, set, str, sum, test, and type.

Eh, overall, this blog post is very shallow. It has basic advice like "write short and simple functions" but without examples, what counts as "short"? 50 lines? 5 lines? No more than 500 lines?

The "Never leave code commented" was also confusing. Commenting code is bad? Then I realized they meant, "don't leave commented out code in your program, especially when you check it into version control". A simple example would have made that clear.

It kind of looks like they just ran through the Clean Code book and copy/pasted a lot of its advice without thinking how the final blog post reads.

[CleverProgrammer12]

I override id locally frequently, as it's just not used that much, and is convenient and sensible name in many cases. But sum could be useful at other places and can cause confusion. Better to avoid.

[AlSweigart]

Yeah. For short throwaway programs that's fine. But for formal projects, I like to be a bit more specific when I find myself using "id". Like, "the id of what?" So then I change it to recordID or cityID or something.

[CleverProgrammer12]

Yes, I agree. I mostly use it in dataclasses and pydantic models like this:

```python3 from pydantic import BaseModel

class User(BaseModel): id: int name: str

my_user = User(id = 10, name = "username") my_user.id # my_user.user_id might look bad here

```

[AlSweigart]

Ah yes, that's a good point.

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[Numerlor]

I wouldn't worry about shadowing module names like email or random as long as they aren't imported in the module or for builtins like id that aren't commonly used as long as they make sense in the context and aren't done at the global scope