[Tutor] Shelve del not reducing file size

[Eric Brunson]

Python is like democracy.  It isn't perfect, but it's the best thing 
come up with so far.  ;-)


Barton David wrote:
> 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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