Ray Bradbury in memoriam

The Illustrated Man turned in the moonlight. He turned again… and again… and again…
Ray Bradbury (The Illustrated Man, 1951)

Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451 and one of the greatest science fiction writers of the 20th century, died at 91 two days ago.

I leave with you, as an homage, a fragment of one the most beautiful stories written by him.

Kaleidoscope (fragment)

[…]

The many good-bys. The short farewells. And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying. Applegate was now no more than a finger blown from the parent body, no longer to be despised and worked against. The brain was exploded, and the senseless, useless fragments of it were far scattered. The voices faded and now all of space was silent. Hollis was alone, falling.

They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the starred deep. There went the captain to the Moon; there Stone with the meteor swarm; there Stimson; there Applegate toward Pluto; there Smith and Turner and Underwood and all the rest, the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, hurled apart.

And I? thought Hollis. What can I do? Is there anything I can do now to make up for a terrible and empty life? If only I could do one good thing to make up for the meanness I collected all these years and didn’t even know was in me! But there’s no one here but myself, and how can you do good all alone? You can’t. Tomorrow night I’ll hit Earth s atmosphere.

I’ll burn, he thought, and be scattered in ashes all over the continental lands. I’ll be put to use. Just a little bit, but ashes are ashes and they’ll add to the land.

He fell swiftly, like a bullet, like a pebble, like an iron weight, objective, objective all of the time now, not sad or happy or anything, but only wishing he could do a good thing now that everything was gone, a good thing for just himself to know about.

When I hit the atmosphere, I’ll burn like a meteor.

“I wonder,” he said, “if anyone’ll see me?”



The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed. “Look, Mom, look! A falling star!”

The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois. “Make a wish,” said his mother. “Make a wish.”

(1949)

Photo: Eneas.

Running pep8 before any commit on Git

Readability counts.

The Zen of Python

One of the things that made me choose Python as a programming language in the first place was its readability.

PEP 8 —the Style Guide for Python Code— gives coding conventions for the Python code and pep8 is a tool to check your code against these conventions.

I use gedit as my editor and I have installed the developer plugins to check my code against PEP 8 every time I save a file but, as not everyone does this, Érico asked me today about a way to enforce this practice.

I started searching the web and I have compiled (from 1, 2 and 3) a nice solution using a pre-commit hook with Git (this is possible also with Subversion, but I'm not pretty interested on it right now):

First you need to be sure you are running Git version 1.7.1 or later, and that you have pep8 installed in your system (check the package documentation).

Create a directory to store the hooks globally:

mkdir -p ~/.git_template/hooks

Tell Git all new repositories you create or clone will use this directory for templates:

git config --global init.templatedir '~/.git_template'

Put the following script in the ~/.git_template/hooks directory:


Make the file executable:

chmod +x ~/.git_template/hooks/pre-commit

If you want to use this hook on an existing repository all you have to do is reinitialize it:

git init

Now the pre-commit hook script lives in the .git/hooks directory of your repository.

Test it trying to commit some changes: if the files you are trying to commit comply with PEP 8 (excepting the list of errors or warnings to ignore), the commit will be done as usual; if there are any issues, the commit will be aborted until you fix them.

Feel free to modify the list of errors and warnings to ignore, globally or from project to project, to fit your personal needs.

Remember PEP 8:

A style guide is about consistency. Consistency with this style guide is important. Consistency within a project is more important. Consistency within one module or function is most important.

But most importantly: know when to be inconsistent -- sometimes the style guide just doesn't apply. When in doubt, use your best judgment. Look at other examples and decide what looks best. And don't hesitate to ask!

Two good reasons to break a particular rule:

1. When applying the rule would make the code less readable, even for someone who is used to reading code that follows the rules.
2. To be consistent with surrounding code that also breaks it (maybe for historic reasons) — although this is also an opportunity to clean up someone else's mess (in true XP style).