On the Naming Recommendations Derived from Expert Python Code

Abstract

Python's naming convention provides suggestions on naming style, but these suggestions are not always clear for beginners who struggle to understand the usefulness of the conventions. In this research, we studied two properties that affect naming, namely, name-length and style. We analyzed python code from five professional project libraries and compared the name statistics with those obtained from student code. Our results show that, compared to students' work, expert developers use longer names (more descriptive) and are more closely compliant with the existing python naming convention. This research provides specific recommendations on the length and style of naming integers, floats, data structures, functions, function arguments and classes for students of Python.