I’m pretty sure you all already know about flake8, a great tool that combine other tools (PyFlakes, pep8 and Ned Batchelder’s McCabe script) to check style issues and code errors.
Working on Talos, I needed to find a way to find dead code on the codebase (the less code, the better!). I found a pretty good tool that helped me: vulture. This is a one shot tool – it can not be automated like flake8 as there is some false positives, but still running it once on an old codebase may be a big win to find and remove useless stuff.
Obviously it is easier to use on python programs – you will have to whitelist a lot of things if you run this on a python library that offers a public API.
If you want to seek and destoy dead code on your python program, give it a try!
