Hello Python community! There are a lot of resources online targeted at beginners that want to learn Python but very rarely do you see articles talking about moving to Python when you already have tons of experience in other languages like Ruby, and especially, many years of Perl experience and is interested in moving to Python.
I'm not looking for information on how to program in Python, that's really easy to find and most of the learning curve will be learning about the standard libraries and overcoming the years of muscle memory from other languages. I'm looking for information on the following topics:
- What's the recommended project structure for a library or a program that'll be distributed via PyPI?
- What are the general best practices to follow when writing "clean Python code"?
- What's the most commonly followed style guide for the language?
- How does import work internally and how does it perform its path lookup for local files (specifically for importing modules internal to a project)?
- How to properly set up pyenv for a project? (This one is tricky for me because the Python community loves pyenv and I'm used to having packages globally installed in Ruby and Perl)
python packaging authority and pytest have pretty good resources on standard repo structure; poetry is a new-kid-on-the-block tool to get started developing packages quickly (i.e., standard repo config, handles dependency environments / works as build tool)
re: formatting & style -- others have mentioned
black; I also recommend ruff to lint/standardize your code to many accepted best practices.import is kind of a clusterf, because you can have absolute
import packagenameand relativefrom . import x.y.zimports, and importing a project-in-development can depend on the IDE you use (i.e., vscode and pycharm are generally smart enough to figure out that asrc/dir in the workspace should be importable, but not always). Usingpip install -ecan install your project-in-dev in "editable" mode and make it available for import. The modules docs may help here.Package management/locking is a a (relatively) rapidly evolving part of the python ecosystem. Because Python can be so dependent on the packages installed in the environment, simply managing the python version (like you would with
pyenv) is insufficient, and it is recommended to create pseudo-hermetic virtual environments per project (venv, virtualenv, poetry, or conda help with this). I can't help with pyenv (I use conda); this might be helpful. I think you would use pyenv to manage the python version and then venv or virtualenv to manage the installed packages. Personally, I would first get used to managing virtual environments withvenvand then deal with pyenv later if you decide you need multiple python versions