Hi, Is it interesting to know if people expect -h to work as a --help equivalent by default? As it directly affects best practices of using Python in command line, can we run such poll on python.org? I thought that this stuff is obvious, but it appears that it is not, so I'd like to see this usability study - it will be interesting for the Python community to know itself better. -- anatoly t.
On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 9:40 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com>wrote:
Hi,
Is it interesting to know if people expect -h to work as a --help equivalent by default?
As it directly affects best practices of using Python in command line, can we run such poll on python.org? I thought that this stuff is obvious, but it appears that it is not, so I'd like to see this usability study - it will be interesting for the Python community to know itself better. -- anatoly t.
I hate typing "-h" only to find that just "--help" works. I'm pretty sure it's obvious and standard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command-line_interface#Built-in_usage_help Yuval Greenfield
On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 11:40 PM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
Is it interesting to know if people expect -h to work as a --help equivalent by default?
As it directly affects best practices of using Python in command line, can we run such poll on python.org? I thought that this stuff is obvious, but it appears that it is not, so I'd like to see this usability study - it will be interesting for the Python community to know itself better.
The argparse and optparse modules in the standard library expose help via both -h and --help by default (and this is in the Python documentation and in the help strings generated by those modules), so I would expect Python users at least to be familiar with both invocations: http://docs.python.org/2/library/optparse.html#generating-help http://docs.python.org/2/library/argparse.html#add-help --Chris
-- anatoly t.
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On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 1:40 AM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
Is it interesting to know if people expect -h to work as a --help equivalent by default?
As it directly affects best practices of using Python in command line, can we run such poll on python.org? I thought that this stuff is obvious, but it appears that it is not, so I'd like to see this usability study - it will be interesting for the Python community to know itself better.
This seems an odd thing for a poll on python.org. I suspect you will not get good data. Whey you say "if people expect" what people? Python developers, users of tools written in Python? sysadmins and other CLI savyusers? Given argparse and optparse expose both -h and --help by default, I would expect the Python community to expect that. This is why I think your data would be skewed. Unless this is what you are testing for. -- Carl K
anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> writes:
Is it interesting to know if people expect -h to work as a --help equivalent by default?
There are too many existing tools that make use of ‘-h’ for other things (e.g. “hostname to connect to”) for me to expect it to mean “help” by default. If I'm expecting an option to be a short name for “help”, it would be ‘-?’. -- \ “One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. | `\ Hiring more bad programmers will just increase our perceived | _o__) need for them.” —David Lorge Parnas, 1999-03 | Ben Finney
participants (6)
-
anatoly techtonik -
Antoine Pitrou -
Ben Finney -
Carl Karsten -
Chris Jerdonek -
Yuval Greenfield