WIP: Add a pylintrc to make it easire to use linter

[joaogui1]

Right now it's just using the same pylintrc as tensor2tensor, I'm trying to tell it to ignore C0103 (since jax doesn't seem to follow PEP8 variable's name guidelines).
Is there anything like a style guide for contributing to jax?

[skye]

There is no style guide, as you can probably tell from looking at the code :)
I'm wary of using tensor2tensor's .pylintrc, because it looks like there's a lot of stuff in there that doesn't apply to us (e.g. ignore=get_references_web.py,get_references_web_single_group.py?), and I think it may be disabling too many checks (e.g. no-member is usually a good one).

I wonder if we should use a minimal .pylintrc that only includes the defaults we're overriding, rather than including everything, which makes it hard to see what's actually relevant.

Here's what I use for myself (I think, I also have all the default options included so it's hard for me to tell what I changed):

# Disable the message, report, category or checker with the given id(s). You
# can either give multiple identifiers separated by comma (,) or put this
# option multiple times (only on the command line, not in the configuration
# file where it should appear only once).You can also use "--disable=all" to
# disable everything first and then reenable specific checks. For example, if
# you want to run only the similarities checker, you can use "--disable=all
# --enable=similarities". If you want to run only the classes checker, but have
# no Warning level messages displayed, use"--disable=all --enable=classes
# --disable=W"
disable=missing-docstring,
        too-many-locals,
        invalid-name,
        protected-name,
        no-else-return,
        fixme,
        protected-access,
        too-many-arguments,
        blacklisted-name,
        too-few-public-methods,
        unnecessary-lambda,

# A comma-separated list of package or module names from where C extensions may
# be loaded. Extensions are loading into the active Python interpreter and may
# run arbitrary code
extension-pkg-whitelist=numpy

# Enable the message, report, category or checker with the given id(s). You can
# either give multiple identifier separated by comma (,) or put this option
# multiple time (only on the command line, not in the configuration file where
# it should appear only once). See also the "--disable" option for examples.
enable=c-extension-no-member

I've found this useful for finding errors without complaining about our rampant PEP8 violations. What do you think? Wanna give this a try and see if we can start from here?

[joaogui1]

I used yours and added redefined-outer-name and redefined-builtin to the disables and set indentation to 2 spaces. What do you guys think of using yapf with the chromium style? I think using it and this pylintrc could make jax development easier.

[skye]

Can you revert this file for now? I like the idea of auto-formatting, but let's do one thing at a time :)

[skye]

nit: if you're gonna keep the [MASTER], etc. headings, indent-string goes under [FORMAT]. Or just remove the headings. Also, please put a blank line between the different directives.

[skye]

Looks good except for the minor comments I left, thanks!

I have limited experience with Python formatters, mostly because I think they don't do a great job... looking at the file you formatted, it looks like it creates a lot of unnecessary vertical space, like by breaking up function arguments on separate lines. Maybe there are settings to make it format things more concisely?

[skye]

Just in case you didn't see the other comment, can you revert the lax_numpy.py formatting changes?

[joaogui1]

wow, I hadn't seen it, I will revert it and remove the yapf style file. The only change I will keep on lax is removing the pylint comments since they've been incorporated on pylintrc, ok?

[skye]

Looks great, thanks!