Replace black with ruff linter / formatter

[jhamon]

Problem

While researching how to integrate some rust extensions into our python, I heard about this alternative tool for code formatting that also does linting. This tool is much faster than black and can also do codestyle linting to enforce some best practices for python.

Ruff is implemented by Astral, which is a company aiming to create a "cargo for python" type experience with python tools that are implemented in rust making them both fast and reliable. I'm interested in some other stuff they are doing (e.g. uv for dependency management), but this seemed like a lower stakes way to test the waters with their stuff.

Solution

Main changes are in:

• Dev dependency changes: add ruff, remove black
• Remove black configs in pyproject.toml.
• Add ruff configs to pyproject.toml. Mostly stuck with defaults, although I disabled a few of the more annoying lint rules for now on a per-file basis.
• Adjust CI to run ruff checks instead of black.
• Update CONTRIBUTING

The rest of this large diff is due to formatting and lint fixes for various code style things.

These checks can be run manually with poetry run ruff check --fix and poetry run ruff format, but otherwise they should automatically be triggered by pre-commit hooks. I documented this in CONTRIBUTING.

Type of Change

• Infrastructure change (CI configs, etc)

Test Plan

Tests should still be green. No functional impact expected.

[aulorbe]

1000% nit, but you probs want to put ruff in backticks, or else it's sorta confusing to read at first glance

[aulorbe]

lgtm!

[rohanshah18]

Looks like a widely used library with frequent updates. LGTM!