Better coding

Task 5: GitHub assignment write more readable code using these suggestions

Please checkout the assignment repo and follow through with the examples and instructions below. Commit any changes to a new branch and open a pull request. If the autograding/CI checks succeed, you have completed all tasks and can merge the pull request with main to submit your assignment.

Further examples

Here are further examples, loosely based on this video. Feel free to take a look if any of these suggestions may help you write better code in the future. Please not that brevity has its limit and sometimes using more lines to write a piece of code can actually be better: If it helps to improve understanding of the code.

Why you should run code in your module only if __name__ is "__main__"

Always encapsulate your module’s content in functions/classes and have all function calls and instantiations contained after the statement

if __name__ == "__main__"

Why? Because, if you import your code as a module, all code that is not contained in a function or class will be run. Now, if you directly run the module,__name__ will be set to "__main__". But if the module is imported, __name__ is set to the module’s name. See the examples module1.py and module2.py in the assignment repo folder chapter5.

Ternary conditionals

Use ternary conditionals to simplify if ... else statements.

Example

Context managers

Use context managers to not have to worry about tear-down methods, like closing a file. Using with open, for example, automatically closes the file after it has been read.

Example

Using enumerate

Use enumerate when you want to access both the list item and its index at the same time when iterating.

Example

Using zip

Use zip if you want to iterate over two lists simultaneously.

Example

Demonstrations

I will demonstrate how to improve the readability in some code snippets. This has mostly to do with design decisions and the SOLID principles. Advice: Plan first, code second!

Example