[Tutor] scratching my head

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Mon, 03 Aug 2015 18:22:32 +1000, Cameron Simpson writes:

>That depends. This is the tutor list; we're helping Clayton debug his code as 
>an aid to learning. While it's good to know about the facilities in the 
>standard library, pointing him directly at fnmatch (which I'd entirely 
>forgotten) is the "give a man a fish" approach to help; a magic black box to do 
>the job for him.
>
>Besides, I'm not sure fnmatch is much better for his task than the more direct 
>methods being discussed.

And I am certain.  It works exactly as he said he wanted -- a less
cumbersome way to solve this problem, which he thought would be done
some way with a for loop, looping over extensions, instead of the
cumbersome way he is doing things.

His design sense was perfectly fine; there is an elegant way to solve
the problem precisely along the lines he imagined -- he just wasn't
aware of this bit of the standard library.

There is no particular virtue in teaching somebody how to build a
pneumatic drill in order to crack walnuts.

Laura