{"id":1423,"date":"2023-10-10T13:33:49","date_gmt":"2023-10-10T12:33:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exponentialdecay.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1423"},"modified":"2025-06-26T19:53:36","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T19:53:36","slug":"linting-as-understanding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exponentialdecay.co.uk\/blog\/linting-as-understanding\/","title":{"rendered":"Linting as understanding"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been working on a Python template repository as part of my day-job at Orcfax<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is based on the popular pypa sample project<\/a> and adds important tooling that supports the quality assurance of projects that many developers are expected to engage with.<\/p>\n

In my template repository I add editor defaults, linting, and prepare the repository for unit tests, and then deployment.<\/p>\n

I have migrated a copy of the template I created for Orcfax to a new file format organisation I have created to capture work I am doing around tools such as ffdev.info<\/a> (the PRONOM signature development utility).<\/p>\n

The new template repository can be found here: ffdev-info\/template.py<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I want to talk about how this tooling can be used as a way of understanding legacy, or new code that you are going to be looking at. Looking at how linting can be useful for learning and understanding.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Linting as understanding<\/h2>\n

The title of this blog came from my introduction to a new piece of code. I wanted to see if I could use the script, but the code was a bit out of date and didn’t use strong Python coding standards – such as those captured in the famous Python PEP-8 guidelines<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I also ran into a similar thing just last week when I converted the code supporting Genesis of a File Format<\/a> into Python 3 from Python 2.<\/p>\n

In both cases I needed help improving:<\/p>\n