Open Stack

I like the idea of measuring complexity.  I looked briefly at `python -m 
mccabe`.  It seems to measure each method independently.  Is this really 
fair?  If I have a class with some big methods, and I break it down into 
more numerous and smaller methods, then the largest method gets smaller, 
but the number of methods gets larger.  A large number of methods is 
itself a form of complexity.  It is not clear to me that said re-org has 
necessarily made the class easier to understand.  I can also break one 
class into two, but it is not clear to me that the project has necessarily 
become easier to understand.  While it is true that when you truly make a 
project easier to understand you sometimes break it into more classes, it 
is also true that you can do a bad job of re-organizing a set of classes 
while still reducing the size of the largest method.  Has the McCabe 
metric been evaluated on Python projects?  There is a danger in focusing 
on what is easy to measure if that is not really what you want to 
optimize.

BTW, I find that one of the complexity issues for me when I am learning 
about a Python class is doing the whole-program type inference so that I 
know what the arguments are.  It seems to me that if you want to measure 
complexity of Python code then something like the complexity of the 
argument typing should be taken into account.

Regards,
Mike
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/attachments/20141017/f182cd99/attachment.html>