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On 26 February 2015 at 08:54, melanie witt <melwittt at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 25, 2015, at 10:51, Duncan Thomas <duncan.thomas at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Is there anybody who'd like to step forward in defence of this rule and explain why it is an improvement? I don't discount for a moment the possibility I'm missing something, and welcome the education in that case
>
> A reason I can think of would be to preserve namespacing (no possibility of function or class name collision upon import). Another reason could be maintainability, scenario being: Person 1 imports ClassA from a module to use, Person 2 comes along later and needs a different class from the module so they import ClassB from the same module to use, and it continues. If only the module had been imported, everybody can just do module.ClassA, module.ClassB instead of potentially multiple imports from the same module of different classes and functions. I've also read it doesn't cost more to import the entire module rather than just a function or a class, as the whole module has to be parsed either way.

I think the primary benefit is that when looking at the code you can
tell where a name came from. If the code is using libraries that one
is not familiar with, this makes finding the implementation a lot
easier (than e.g. googling it and hoping its unique and not generic
like 'create' or something.

-Rob

-- 
Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com>
Distinguished Technologist
HP Converged Cloud