Need to establish standards for code linting

[emcangi]

Code linting varies between individual computers/programming environments, and norms can also vary between Python packages. We need to agree upon a code linting standard to avoid introducing disagreements on spacing, carriage returns, etc. that can lead to confusing commits if linting changes are accidentally made along with other content changes.

Noted by #54 (comment)

[planetarymike]

What linter do you use? I'm set up to use flake8, but could switch to pylint or ruff easily, and to other with more difficulty.

[emcangi]

I'm on flake8 also in Sublime Text using Sublime Linter, so it should be giving us the same feedback! I've never even heard of ruff.

I think the main issues were styling choices that aren't covered by linting, and are instead left up to the individual module maintainers to establish conventions, especially where to begin docstrings, either on the same line as """ or the following line. I just personally dislike having the text start on the same line so I would compulsively change it without realizing, but this style I think is a numpy standard that many packages adopt. I could be forced to accept this relatively benign style though.

There are some other inconsistent styling things that we ignored for now that should be caught by the linter, and could be captured in one large "styling update" commit/PR:

• Whitespace around operators is inconsistent
• Double carriage return between functions or between imports and functions (mostly present, but some anomalous files)
• Line length, which relates to whether to print each argument to a multi-argument function call or a definition on a new line: I realize now in writing this that I set my Sublime Text to ignore the line length rule because it was giving me anxiety, as it was something I didn't have time to mess with while trying to defend. I could turn it back on though.

[planetarymike]

If we're both using flake8, great! At that point the main thing is to not make formatting changes unless you're also making substantive changes to the content of the lines.

We do need to decide on a line length limit and enforce it; 120 characters?