[Tutor] Shelve del not reducing file size

[Barton David]

Eric Brunson wrote:
> You seem like a smart guy that's having a bad day, so I'm cutting you
> slack.
 
Thanks Eric. Yes I did indeed have a bad day (and it got much much worse),
and this is most definitely a case of a bad workman blaming his tools. I
apologise to all concerned for voicing my frustrations: it was clearly ill-advised.
Still.. call me idealistic but I feel like a good toolmaker should try to listen to her
clients.
 
I am not a dedicated programmer. I have other stuff on my plate. I probably
wouldn't be a programmer at all if Python wasn't (in the early stages) so
fabulously friendly.
 
Alan Gauld wrote:
> But Pythons library is not newbie friendly, sorry. How does 
> a newbie know when to use pickle v cpickle? or urllib v urllib2? And 
> which of the xml parsers? And as for thev mess that is glob/os/path/shutil?
> Its not clear to me even after 10 years of using Python which function
> sits where and why. And what about the confusion over system(),
> popen(),commands(),spawn(), subprocess() etc. or why is there time
> and datetime? Sure it makes sense once you've played with Python
> for a while it makes some sense and you learn the role of history.
 
This is very much how this particular 'newbie' has experienced things. I'm
not here to damn Python, but to praise it, for opening my eyes to a whole
bunch of stuff. But you know when I teach biology and genetics, and the
kids don't get it, I feel like the onus is on me to improve my teaching. And
if I code a tool for people in my lab, and they can't use it, then I feel like
I've got some work to do, either in teaching or in making the tool easier to
use.
 
That's just me, Tiger, and I'm sorry it makes you spit venom. Not my
intention at all. But it's Alan's hand that I want to shake, because as
far as I can tell, he's looking to the future, to the next generation, to
the ugly reality and the bright potential, and quite frankly, you're not.

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