If I type-annotate my code properly, and use something like Pylance in my IDE, when I hover over a method or function I get helpful information about that code's 'signature': the variables it expects, their types, and what I can expect from that code in terms of a response. All that is great, and I have come to rely on it in my daily coding activities.
Anyway, I was reviewing some old code of mine, and was trying to make sense of it after 18+ months (I'm sure I'm alone in that, right? lol). And although I had commented the code in question back then, looking at it now I found the comments to actually clutter things up, instead of being very helpful.
So it got me to thinking: what if there were some sort of plugin or code-assistant library that, when I hovered over a section of code, not only gave me the code's signature/type annotation info, but also gave me the documentation for that particular section? I could potentially make the comments much longer and clearer without having to worry about code bloat, or its visual impact.
tldr;
is there a way to make my comments be metadata instead of having to be embedded in the code itself?
I am wrting a Python application for the first time and I am using Pycharm as the slected IDE. One thing that I notice I can;t see all classses and methods for the object I am using. I have coded with intelligIdea to code Scala and Java as well. They are easier to code since code intelligence is really handy but In Python it is not convineit..
suppose I am writing
divs=innerTree.cssselect('div.story-body__inner')
when I write innerTree. Pycharm doesnt suggest cssseelct while I used to write Scala/Java with the same Idea, they suggested all available accesible classes.
Is thet any problem with my IDEA?
There are a few of possible reasons:
innerTree doesn't actually have a cssselect method. Seems obvious, but this one catches me out more often than I'd like to admit.
PyCharm doesn't know what innerTree is an instance of.
You need to clear PyCharm's cache and restart. Which is pretty much the "have you tried turning it off and on again?" of PyCharm.
Side note, you can also use IntelliJ to do everything that PyCharm does. It's a bit harder to set up, but it's easier that switching back and forth i.m.o.
Is there any existing python code obfuscating tool for Python3?
Please do not try to teach me that Python isn't the right choice if I want to hide/obfuscate my code. Or that correct licenses should protect the code instead of obfuscation...
Update: This question does not duplicate issue How do I protect Python code?: I simply ask if there is a tool to obfuscate Python. Nothing more and nothing less. (If there is none I wonder why I get so much feedback...)
No matter what you do, at some point the Python interpreter is going to be reading in unobfuscated Python byte-code. From that it is dead easy to get back to your source code (minus comments and non-obvious layout). This is why everybody says it's pretty much impossible to obfuscate Python. The fact that it's pretty much impossible to obfuscate Python implies that there are no good tools for doing so. I'm afraid it's just wishful thinking to say "I know this can't be done very effectively, but are there any tools for doing it?"
Probably the best you can do will be to encrypt your code with standard encryption tools, and write a little wrapper program in some other language that just decrypts your Python and runs your program, then deletes the unencrypted code when it's done. If you want to put way too much effort in you could probably do something with the C API and embedding the Python interpreter in a C program to feed your unencrypted Python to the interpreter only in memory, rather than files on disk.
Note that these schemes will still be relatively easy to get around, and don't work at all if what you want is to provide importable Python modules (rather than whole programs). Which is why I wouldn't expect to find anyone's already written a tool for you to do it.
I wouldn't go the obfuscating approach if I were you and rather investigate alternative ways to ship executable binary files instead of (byte)-code.
Tools that are known to me (there are probably a few others):
http://www.ohloh.net/p/py2c (converts Python into C code which you can then compile)
http://www.pyinstaller.org/
http://cx-freeze.sourceforge.net/
http://www.py2exe.org/ (Windows only)
http://svn.pythonmac.org/py2app/py2app/trunk/doc/index.html (Mac only)
I don't know how hack-proof any of those tools are, but I think it's worth taking a look.
Edit: Damnit, missed the Python 3 part. It's a little hard to help because you don't write anything about the product itself (OS, GUI, etc). If it can be also Python 2 code but you have written all your code in Python 3 already, I suggest 3to2.
I'd recommend using pyarmor.
It converts code to binary form. Only drawback would be, you need to obfuscate code for every OS separately.
There is no way to obfuscate Python code in any useful manner, and no reason why you would want to. You seem to want to obfuscate the code to protect it. That is completely pointless, as you can instead ship only the .pyc files, meaning you don't ship the source code at all. Not that shipping only .pyc files will help you, as there are uncompilers for .pyc-files.
If your program is reasonably simple and well-coded, creating executables with cx-freeze, py2exe et al, means that the .pyc files end up inside the executable file, and hence are marginally harder to find, and it's also less obvious that you use Python, so that might be help. But more importantly, it might make installation simpler for your users. They like that.
If you really want to obfuscate your code in a useful way, convert all of it to use Cython, which will create C-files you can compile. This will also speed up the program. Cython is however not fully Python compatible, so you will probably have to make changes.
And I know you don't want to hear this, but I'll say it for the benefit of others:
All of this is of course stupid and misguided. Open source is good for you. Really. You shouldn't protect your code, you should get as many eyes and hands on it as possible.
Trust me on this: Your main worry should be about getting more users, not less pirates. And you get more users by making your software better, not worse. And open source will help in that.
Pyminifier is a Python code minifier, obfuscator, and compressor.
This tool works on Python 3
Update: This project has been discontinued.
The best way to hide your code is to not release it.
Advertise a service - you receive their data then return the processed data. Transmissions can be via the web, email, DHL, pigeon, telephone, graviton pulse, ...
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I have heard before that many Python developers don't use an IDE like Eclipse because it is unnecessary with a language like Python.
What are the reasons people use to justify this claim?
I'd say the main reason is because Python isn't horribly verbose like, e.g., Java. You don't need an IDE to generate 100s of lines of boilerplate because you don't need 100s of lines of boilerplate in Python. You tend to automate stuff within the language instead of further up the toolchain.
A second reason is that you don't need build process automation b/c there's no build process.
I'm going to risk offending some people and express something that I think a lot of python lovers will agree with: Java is so bloody cumbersome and verbose that one almost needs an IDE like Eclipse just to manage its unwieldy bloat.
With python, the main programming-specific features I want from my editor are syntax highlighting and a jump-to-definition command. Bonus points for a complementary return-from-jump command.
I find Geany does what I need, and is refreshingly light, quick, and stable compared to monster IDEs like Eclipse. For other suggestions, take a look at this question.
I know why you need (can benefit from) a good IDE - Rapid Application Development
Time is money :) And I'd much rather spend my time solving problems than typing every little piece of code in.
Two Main Reasons
Because of the dynamic typing and generally super-powerful functionality, there just isn't much extra typing that the IDE can do for you. Implementing a Java interface in a package is a lot of work and dozens of lines of boilerplate. In Python or Ruby it just doesn't have to be typed in the first place.
Because of the dynamic typing, the fancy editor doesn't have nearly as much information at its fingertips, and so the capability is reduced as well.
So the squeeze is top-down from the reduced need and bottom-up from the reduced editor capability, the net result being a really small application area. The benefit of using a fast and familiar day-to-day editor ends up higher than the benefit of the mostly-pointless IDE.
I suppose it's also possible that the categories are a bit fuzzy now. Vi(1) is the lightest-weight and fastest "plain" editor around, and yet vim(1) can now colorize every language under the sun and TextMate is classified as "lightweight", so all of the categories have really begun to merge a bit.
Python is dynamically typed and the way it handles modules as objects makes it impossible to determine what a name will resolve to at a certain time without actually running the code. Therefore, the 'tab completion' feature of IDEs is pretty useless.
Also, since Python doesn't have a build step, an IDE isn't needed to automate this. You can just fire up python app.py in a terminal and have much more control over how it runs.
It sounds like 'You don't need vehicle to go to work' to me. It might be true or not, depends on how far your workplace is.
IDE's assist in developer productivity and can equally apply to Python. The defining thing about an IDE is the ability to not have to "mode switch" between tasks such as editing, compiling, testing, running and debugging etc.
Python uses dynamic typing and interpreting, rather than compiling.
The interpreter itself will output comprehensive error messages, similar to Perl.
If you look at dynamically typed programming languages in general, you'll find that most of them are not really suitable for IDEs. RAD components (code completion, code generation, code templates, etc) can be included in almost any smart text editor, like Vim, Emacs, Gedit, or SciTE.
I use Vim and Gedit for most of my programming, and I find, that I don't need IDE-ish stuff other than that, what is already included in those text editors. When I program in Java, however, I use Eclipse most of the time, since keeping track of all those parts manually, would be too time consuming. I tend not to use IDE's for my C++ stuff, too, but when the projects grows beyond a certain size, I tend to use either Eclipse (CDT), NetBeans, Code::Blocks, or something like that.
So it's the family of languages itself, that make IDE's unnecessary, but it doesn't mean that working with IDE's with those languages, is bad practice.
Side Note: There's even a Lua environment for Eclipse. Out of all languages, Lua is probably one of the least that needs an IDE...
Well I use an IDE when programming in Python on my computer. Its easier that way . But when on the run or on university's terminal , I prefer terminal .
I'm still fairly new to Python and use an IDE with code completion but find myself rarely needing it, Python does a really good job of not having an uncessarily large number of verbose calls, as dsimcha pointed out above. I find that just using a basic IDE I can work efficiently in it and the fact that the code is a lot less cluttered without having brackets makes it easier to work with files that have a lot of lines of code (something that I found unbearable in PHP due to all its syntax clutter)
As far as #Postman's answer, I'm not sure that having an IDE makes RAD any faster, at least not in the case of python, its such a succinct language, the only thing that it would help in would be code completion, the way you answered it it sounds more like you are hinting at the use of a framework, which I believe is still very important in Python which does make RAD much more possible than otherwise.
The problems is IDEs dont work very well with dynamic languages.
The IDE cannot second guess runtime duck typing so other than some basic syntax checking and displaying the keywords in pretty colours they ar enot much help.
My personal experience is with groovy and eclipse where eclipse is actually pretty annoying. Method completion for a groovy object brings up about 200 posabilties, it constantly insert quotes and brackets exactly where you dont want them and messes up the syntax coloring whenever it encounters a reasonably complex regular expression. I would ditch eclipse except the majority of the code base is in Java where eclipse is useful.
I'm currently working on a simple wxPython app that's essentially document based. So far I've been manually implementing the usual open/save/undo/redo etc etc stuff.
It occurred to me that wxPython must have something to help me out and after a bit of searching revealed the docview package.
At this point though I'm just not quite sure how to hook everything up and get things started. Anyone got any good links or hints about places to start?
The docs seems to be a little thin about this and Robin Dunn's wxPython book doesn't really cover this package at all.
You might take a look at the docviewdemo.py from the wxPython Docs and Demos:
on my machine they are located:
C:\Program Files\wxPython2.8 Docs and Demos\samples\pydocview\
C:\Program Files\wxPython2.8 Docs and Demos\samples\docview\
In addition to the ones mentioned, there is quite an extensive example docview/pydocview in the samples\ide. If you want it to run you will have to make a few code corrections (I have submitted a ticket that outlines the fixes at trac.wxwidgets.org #11237). It is pretty complex but I found it handy to figure out how to do some more complex things. For example, samples\ide\activegrid\tools\ProjectEditor.py is built from scratch and has undo support etc rather than just relying on a control that does everything for you already. That way you can see how things are supposed to be done at the detailed level. The documentation is rather useless in that regard.
If you have decided against using docview/pydocview I have a spreadsheet application built on wxPython that you may find useful as an example. While it does not implement a document view framework it does have some characteristics of it and I've implemented an undo/redo system. Check it out at http://www.missioncognition.net/pysheet/ I'm currently working on a pydocview based app so I expect that to be up on my site eventually.