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Thoughts on Black

written by Eric J. Ma on 2018-11-12 | tags: python code style


Having used Black for quite a while now, I have a hunch that it will continue to surpass its current popularity amongst projects.

It's one thing to be opinionated about things that matter for a project, but don't matter personally. Like code style. It's another thing to actually build a tool that, with one command, realizes those opinions in (milli)seconds. That's exactly what Black does.

At the end of the day, it was, and still is, a tool that has a very good human API - that of convenience.

By being opinionated about what code ought to look like, black has very few configurable parameters. Its interface is very simple. Convenient.

By automagically formatting every Python file in subdirectories (if not otherwise configured so), it makes code formatting quick and easy. Convenient.

In particular, by being opinionated about conforming to community standards for code style with Python, black ensures that formatted code is consistently formatted and thus easy to read. Convenient!

Because of this, I highly recommend the use of black for code formatting.

pip install black

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