Example from Raymond Hettinger's talk, "Beyond PEP 8 -- Best practices for beautiful intelligible code - PyCon 2015"

jnettool.py

# From "Raymond Hettinger - Beyond PEP 8 -- Best practices for beautiful intelligible code - PyCon 2015"

# Bad code

import jnettools.toolselements.NetworkElement, \
       jnettools.tools.Routing, \
       jnettools.tools.RouteInspector

ne=jnettools.tools.elements.NetworkElement( '171.0.2.45' )
try:
    routing_table=ne.getRoutingTable()  #fetch table

except jnettools.tools.elements.MissingVar:
    # Record table fault
    logging.exception ( '''No routing table found''' )
    # Undo partial changes
    ne.cleanup( '''rollback''' )

else:
    num_routes=routing_tables.getSize() # determine table size
    for RToffset in range( num_routes ):
        route=routing_table.getRouteByIndex( RToffset )
        name=route.getName()        # route name
        ipaddr=route.getIPAddr()       # ip address
        print "%15s -> %s"% (name,ipaddr) # format nicely
finally:
    ne.cleanup( ''''commit''' ) # lockin changes
    ne.disconnect()
  
  
# First refactoring
  
import jnettools.toolselements.NetworkElement
import jnettools.tools.Routing
import jnettools.tools.RouteInspector

ne = jnettools.tools.elements.NetworkElement('171.0.2.45')
try:
    routing_table = ne.getRoutingTable()
except jnettools.tools.elements.MissingVar:
    logging.exception ('No routing table found')
    ne.cleanup('rollback')
else:
    num_routes = routing_tables.getSize()
    for RToffset in range(num_routes):
        route = routing_table.getRouteByIndex(RToffset)
        name = route.getName()
        ipaddr = route.getIPAddr()
        print "%15s -> %s"% (name,ipaddr)
finally:
    ne.cleanup('commit')
    ne.disconnect()
  
# Second refactoring

from nettools import NetworkElement

with NetworkElement('171.0.2.45') as ne:
    for route in ne.routing_table:
        print "%15s -> %s" % (route.name, route.ipaddr)

There's a typo (missing dot between tools & elements) in the first import in the original and the first refactoring examples.

But what I found strange in the original code were the imports altogether - I don't think the code was ever actually run :-)

• import jnettools.tools,elements.NetworkElement should likely be from jnettools.tools.elements import NetworkElement (unless some code before messed with sys.modules :-) )
• and the jnettools.tools.Routing & jnettools.tools.RouteInspector imports seem superfluous altogether (unless they do something silly like dynamically register themselves with the system somewhere upon import instead of getting imported by the code using them :-))