Why does Pylint object to single-character variable names?

Question

I\'m still getting used to Python conventions and using Pylint to make my code more Pythonic, but I\'m puzzled by the fact that Pylint doesn\'t like single character variable na

Answer 1

The deeper reason is that you may remember what you intended a, b, c, x, y, and z to mean when you wrote your code, but when others read it, or even when you come back to your code, the code becomes much more readable when you give it a semantic name. We're not writing stuff once on a chalkboard and then erasing it. We're writing code that might stick around for a decade or more, and be read many, many times.

Use semantic names. Semantic names I've used have been like ratio, denominator, obj_generator, path, etc. It may take an extra second or two to type them out, but the time you save trying to figure out what you wrote even half an hour from then is well worth it.