Enforce Newspaper Style with Flake

Motivation

Good code reads like a newspaper. Start with the highest abstraction, go to the details. This also enables to read the code without an editor.

Quoting Robert C. Martin from his Clean Code book.

“Think of a well-written newspaper article. You read it vertically. At the top you expect a headline that will tell you what the story is about and allows you to decide whether it is something you want to read. The first paragraph gives you a synopsis of the whole story, hiding all the details while giving you the broad-brush concepts. As you continue downward, the details increase until you have all the dates, names, quotes, claims, and other minutia.”

In Python newspaper code should look like this.

def headline():
    text()

def text():  # this needs to be defined after the usage.
    ...

There hasn't been an automatic way in python to check for this. So here it is.

Usage

# install the flake8 extension for newspaper style
pip3 install flake8-newspaper-style==0.4.2
# then check your code
flake8 --select=NEW src  # here it restricts flake8 to newspaper style issues

References

• Clean Code book by Robert C. Martin
• Clean Code formatting matters