pylint #4731 improve newcommers' user experience [open]

The initial use of pylint is likely to drown the user in dozens or hundreds of messages about violated coding conventions. More important warnings cannot be found amongst this chaff. (Not that I'm really against coding conventions, but badly named variables are not errors: they are merely things that may cause confusion in the programmer, which then might lead to an error.)

A new user doesn't know if pylint is any good or not. His or her first desire is to find out "Is this going to help me?" If he or she can't tell -- because the juicy output is hidden amongst a lot of low-priority stuff about naming conventions -- there is a strong temptation to say "Oh, sod it. I'll try pychecker instead. sudo apt-get remove pylint"

You need to convince the new user that pylint is worth spending time on. Unlike you, the new user has no commitment to using +pylint. With apt-get, it's easy come and easy go with only 1 minute of experimentation in between. You need pylint to prove its value in that single minute.

Or finally, put a counter in so that pylint (by default) will only display the first 10 errors/warnings in each category. That way, if you run pylint on code that follows different coding conventions, you won't drown.

-- Greg Kochanski gpk at kochanski dot org