We now have a first idea of what clean code is, and a workable interpretation of it, which will serve us as a reference point for the rest of this book.
More importantly, we understood that clean code is something much more important than the structure and layout of the code. We have to focus on how the ideas are represented on the code to see if they are correct. Clean code is about readability, maintainability of the code, keeping technical debt to the minimum, and effectively communicating our ideas into the code so that others can understand the same thing we intended to write in the first place.
However, we discussed that the adherence to coding styles or guidelines is important for multiple reasons. We have agreed that this is a condition that is necessary, but not sufficient, and since it is a minimal requirement every solid project should comply with, it is clear that is something we better leave to the tools. Therefore, automating all of these checks becomes critical, and in this regard, we have to keep in mind how to configure tools such as Mypy, Pylint, and more.
The next chapter is going to be more focused on the Python-specific code, and how to express our ideas in idiomatic Python. We will explore the idioms in Python that make for more compact and efficient code. In this analysis, we will see that, in general, Python has different ideas or different ways to accomplish things compared to other languages.