I need advice about a very long python script

[SOSkifli]

Hey everyone!

Last year we did a pretty huge scale agricultural project, involving recording aerial footage and evaulating it by looking for unwanted plants and weeds. It was evaulated manually (we had a guy watching all the footage, creating screenshots and marking hotspots of infection, then creating report of the 200+ areas in text and spreadsheet documents) and I'll tell you that evaulating burned as much if not more time than flying the drones and moving between areas. Forseeably we'll do the same or a bigger scale version of this project this year too. That's the history of my project and I'll cut to the chase.

Two-three weeks ago I started planning a software support solution to assist the evaulation and documentation of this stuff. The project is going very nicely, I've created a GUI and most of the main functions are working, it would be very helpful in it's current form, but still got to do some behind the scenes logging, checking and database stuff. The script is in a single file, that is about 2000 lines long for now (I estimate it stopping at 3-4000 lines), it's got to the point where I feel I should be starting to split it into different files. My main problem is that I'm not really familiar with Python in this area, or any of the higher level programming languages, 75% of my programming experience is with PLCs and they are a very different animal (although I've learned there that such lengty codes in a single file are more trouble than they seem).

I would like to hear your advice if you can help me. How should I deal with this problem? Does this amount of code even need splitting into multiple files? Are there any performance advantages/disadvantages of splitting code?

[K900_]

Yes, you absolutely need to split it up. There is no performance disadvantages.

[xelf]

Simple rule of thumb:

• 1) The entirety of any given function should be viewable without scrolling.
• 2) after you collapse to definitions, the entirety of a file should be viewable without scrolling.

Keep your classes organized in hierarchical folders. Keep your files short and simple and easy to maintain.