On Jul 27, 2013, at 03:13 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

>- I think we should recommend against tabs outright.  They are getting more
>- and more misunderstood.

+1

>- Regarding line length, I think it is reasonable to mention that many
>- organizations are settling on 100 as a compromise.  On newer laptops you
>- can still fit two terminal windows (with a reasonable font size) side by
>- side.  (Also many people checking code into the stdlib ignore the 80 char
>- limit. :-( )

Really?  I haven't seen much 100 character limits.  Have you seen this at
Google or Dropbox?

As for the stdlib checkins > 80 chars, yeah, that really annoys me!

>- Which reminds me.  Do we have a recommendation yet to write
>  except Exception:
>instead of
>  except:
>If not, we should.

PEP 8 current says this:

  A bare ``except:`` clause will catch SystemExit and
  KeyboardInterrupt exceptions, making it harder to interrupt a
  program with Control-C, and can disguise other problems.  If you
  want to catch all exceptions that signal program errors, use
  ``except Exception:`` (bare except is equivalent to ``except
  BaseException:``).

>- I wouldn't mind seeing at least a mild recommendation against using
>exceptions for non-local control flow.  The lessons of StopIteration
>suggest that such designs are often fraught with subtle problems.

As with everything (and which IMHO does not need to be stated again), there
are sometimes good reasons to stray from the recommendations in the PEP.  So
in general +1 for such a mild con recommendation.  Those who understand why
it's generally a bad idea will also understand when it's proper to stray.

(The only argument against such things is of course the pep8 tool, which
codifies the recommendations in this PEP.  Some packages actually run the pep8
checker as part of their test suite, so if we change a recommendation and that
gets pulled into pep8, then tests can break.)