Sustainable Python scripts
Python is a great language to write a standalone script. Getting to the result can be a matter of a dozen to a few hundred lines of code and, moments later, you can forget about it and focus on your next task.
Six months later, a co-worker asks you why the script fails and you don’t have a clue: no documentation, hard-coded parameters, nothing logged during the execution and no sensible tests to figure out what may go wrong.
Turning a “quick-and-dirty” Python script into a sustainable version, which will be easy to use, understand and support by your co-workers and your future self, only takes some moderate effort. As an illustration, let’s start from the following script solving the classic Fizz-Buzz test:
import sys for n in range(int(sys.argv[1]), int(sys.argv[2])): if n % 3 == 0 and n % 5 == 0: print("fizzbuzz") elif n % 3 == 0: print("fizz") elif n % 5 == 0: print("buzz") else: print(n)
Documentation
I find useful to write documentation before coding: Continue reading
