A while back I noticed flake8 spitting out warnings about W504 while building a multiproduct:
Line breaks should occur before the binary operator to keep all operators aligned.
I found the offending lines, PEP-ified them accordingly - one small contribution to hygiene, a minor reduction in kipple - and I kicked off another build.
BUILD FAILED
Oops. I must’ve messed something up - a stray character, or maybe I didn’t quite get the whitespace right. Taking a look at the build output indicated that I was now running afoul of W503:
Line breaks should occur after the binary operator to keep all variable names aligned.
Wait…but…isn’t that…isn’t that precisely the opposite of the thing I just “fixed”? I did a little research and as it turns out: yep, it sure is.
So, what now? Call up Knuth and give him a piece of my mind? Close up my MBP, drop it in the trash on the way out the door, and go find a gig as far away from tech as possible?
I took a walk. I took some deep breaths. I reflected on the unfathomable vastness of the Universe.
When I got back to my keyboard, I reverted the change, added W504 to the flake8 ignore list, and moved on with my life. I reckon sometimes that’s all we can do.