[time_to_smile]

I'm in ML and I would also like an answer to this question.

I've seen a lot of Python people sprinkle imports all over the place in their code. I suspect this is a bad habit learned from too much time working in notebooks where you often have an "oh right, I need XXX library now" and just import it as you need it.

The aggressive aliasing I do get since in DS/ML work it's very common to have the same function do slightly different things depending on the library (standard deviation between numpy and pandas is a good example)

But I personally like all of my imports at the top so I know what this code I'm about to read is going to be doing. I do seem to be in the minority in this (and would be glad to be correct if I'm make some major error).

[matsemann]

I often end up having to inline imports, because python doesn't support circular imports.

Of course, "don't do circular imports". But if my Orders model has OrderLines, and my OrderLines points to their Order, it's damn hard to avoid without putting everything in one huge file..

[jwilber]

Almost every tech company will have some sort of commit hook using isort to force correct import ordering at the top of the file.

[claytonjy]

Ha, if only! I've been the one to introduce this at the last three jobs I've had, two of which had hundreds of engineers and plenty of python code before I got there.

"Best practices" are incredibly unevenly distributed, and I suspect this is only more true for data/ML-heavy python code.

[clawlor]

New (v5) isort doesn't move imports to the top of the file anymore, at least not by default. There is a flag to retain the old behavior, but even then I don't think it will move imports from, say, inside a function body to the top of the module.