Best practices for coding

When one uses Python for predictive modelling, one needs to write small snippets of code. To ensure that one gets the maximum out of their code snippets and that the work is reproducible, one should be aware of and aspire to follow the best practices in coding. Some of the best practices for coding are as follows.

Commenting the codes

There is a tradeoff between the elegance and understandability of a code snippet. As a code snippet becomes more elegant, its understandability by a new user (other than the author of the snippet) decreases. Some of the users are interested only in the end results, but most of the users like to understand what is going on behind the hood and want to have a good understanding of the code.

For the code snippet to be understandable by a new person or the user of the code, it is a common practice to comment on the important lines, if not all the lines, and write the headings for the major chunks of the code. Some of the properties of a...