Newbie response, was Re: Why is Python popular, while Lisp and Scheme aren't?

[Terry Hancock]

On Monday 11 November 2002 12:46 am,  Robin Munn wrote:
> Brad Hards <bhards at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> > I'm certainly amazed at the tolerance people have for questions that are 
> > readily answered in a number of on-line tutorials, and in both the Python 
> > books that I have (Learning Python and the Python Cookbook). In the
> > end, the friendly attitude may be the killer feature.
> 
> Out of curiosity, do you think a response like: "That's covered in the
> Python tutorial -- look at [URL]" will strike a newbie as friendly or
> not? I ask because that's the kind of answer I will tend to write when
> I'm in a hurry. Sometimes I will take the time to phrase the answer in
> my own words, but often I won't want to duplicate the work that someone
> else has already done in writing that tutorial. So if you were a newbie
> getting a curt response like that, would you feel it was a brushoff, or
> would you feel like your question had been answered?

I'm a perpetual newbie (because I keep switching domains), so I have
a lot of experience at it. ;-).  This also means I have thick skin compared to
most newbies, but IMHO, the response you describe is basically fine. The
best part is where you actually specify the URL. Generally the newbie's 
problem is that they didn't know where to find the information (and "ask 
google" is frequently inappropriate -- often it's not clear what exactly 
should be searched for).

Another reason people ask on list is social -- they want to get opinions of 
what they're doing, find encouragement, and also to take the temperature of 
the user community. The importance of these human-factors cannot be 
overestimated. The *tone* of the post, not its length, is what matters for 
this aspect (and one ill-timed "RTFM" can drive someone off permanently).

Ultimately every newbie question can be answered by examining:

1) the documentation
2) the source
3) sufficiently clever web searches
4) experimental results with the actual program

However, it make take an inordinate amount of time to do it! How much is a 
newbie's time worth, and how much is your time worth?  No one can answer 
those questions absolutely. I think the Python community has a better 
realization than most, that, especially in a world of free software, newbies 
count. The more people coding, the better the codebase will get.

Professional programmers who are in it for the money, will benefit by making 
their language of choice seem difficult. This causes a barrier to entry, 
creates scarcity, and drives the salaries for those who are *in* up.  You see 
this behavior frequently in the languages of choice for proprietary software 
development (and it's been around in many trades, long before software was 
invented).

But in a free-software development environment, the more people who are 
user/developers of your code, the better your code will get, and the less 
work you will have to do to maintain it (up to a point, anyway).  So, it's to 
your advantage to teach.  Part of Python's heritage is as a teaching 
language, IIRC, so it's not a big surprise that it's a good language to start 
people on, and, also being quite powerful enough to use for real 
applications, it is a very good choice for open-source development, where the 
line between user and developer is always blurred.

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com