How I shot myself in the foot with pylint

I mentioned this in passing in a recent post, but I thought I deserved to make fun of myself more fully here. One of the things I’ve tried to do as I work on code I’ve inherited from predecessors is to clean it up a bit. I’m not a computer science expert, so by “clean up”, I mostly mean style issues as opposed to improving the data structures or anything truly useful like that.

Most of the development I do is on Python code that gets compiled into Windows executables and run as an actuarial workflow. I discovered early on in the process that if I’m working on code that runs toward the end of the workflow, having to wait 20 minutes just to find out that I made some dumb syntax or variable name error is really annoying. I got in the habit of running pylint before I compiled to help catch at least some of the more obvious problems.

Over time, I decided to start taking action on some of the pylint output. Recently, I declared war on variables named “str”. Since str() is a Python function, pylint rightly complained about it. Since the method that used “str” did string replacement, I opted for the still-not-great-but-at-least-not-terrible “string”. I replaced all of the places “str” appeared as a variable and went about my business.

As I was testing some other changes, I noticed that some of my path replacement was failing (though I didn’t know that’s where it was at first). So I shoved a whole bunch of logger calls into the “prepare” script to see where exactly it was failing. Finally, I found it. Then I shoved more into the module where the failure happened. I had to work down through several method calls before I finally found it.

There was still one instance of “str” there, but now Python thought it was the str() builtin and got really confused. In hindsight, it should have been totally obvious that I had inflicted this pain on myself, but several days had passed and I had forgotten that I had messed around in that function. I should have consulted the revision history sooner.

One thought on “How I shot myself in the foot with pylint

  1. Yep, “string” is a terrible variable name. The variable probably has a purpose or role in the program, that should be reflected in the name rather than a restatement of (computer) physical representation. The good name might be an actuarial term, or if it’s a local-scope temporary variable, ‘s’ or temp”

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