[Chicago] [python-advocacy] Marketing Python - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

[Peter Fein]

On Thursday 20 April 2006 05:36 pm, Atul Varma wrote:
> On 4/20/06, Michael Tobis <mtobis at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Python is so powerful that coding is much easier than documentation!
> > While this is a good problem to have that doesn't mean we shouldn't
> > try to solve it.

True. Though things like http://epydoc.sf.net/ are a nice addition.

> This is at the root of what I don't like about a lot of Python
> packages.  I've heard some Python people refer to good documentation
> as being "newbie-friendly" or "marketing-friendly", but I think of it
> as just being, well, humane.

I just want to get work done.

> When I'm looking at a lot of Python packages--especially the web
> development ones--because of their sparse and often inconsistent
> documentation, they feel like they're unfinished products that are
> still works-in-progress.  They don't "just work"; doing anything
> nontrivial with them almost always involves tripping over outdated
> documentation or code, or running into empty pages of text with TODO's
> on them saying "we need to write this!".

True, though I want to be able to read and modify the source.  Python code 
lets me do that much more easily than PHP.  The fact that most Python modules 
(esp. the standard library) are written *in python* instead of C is a big 
win.

> People like me aren't avoiding Python web development frameworks
> because there's too many of them.  They're avoiding the frameworks
> because all of them are actually really confusing in one way or
> another.  That's why a lot of people end up rolling their own, because
> doing that is a lot easier than wading through and dealing with any of
> the other Python-based solutions they see.

We're going with http://nick.borko.org/pse/

-- 
Peter Fein                                                     pfein at pobox.com
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