On Sunday, February 16, 2014 8:53:47 PM UTC+5:30, Roy Smith wrote: > We get a lot of newbie questions on this list. People are eager to jump > in and answer them (which is wonderful), but sometimes we get off on > tangents about trivia and lose sight of the real question, and our > audience.
> The particular one that set me off just now (I'm leaving off the names > because it's a generic problem) was somebody asking a basic, "how do I > code an algorithm to manipulate this data" question. They presented > some sample data as a tuple of tuples. > One of the (otherwise well-written and informative) responses started > out with a 20-line treatise on the difference between lists and tuples, > and why the OP should have used a list of tuples. Nothing they said was > wrong, but it wasn't essential to explaining the algorithm. > What I'm asking is that when people answer questions, try to figure out > what the core question really is, and answer that first. If there's > other suggestions you can make for how things might be further improved, > add those later. > Also, try to figure out what the experience level of the OP is, and > scale your answer to fit their ability. I've seen people who are > obviously struggling with basic concepts in an introductory programming > class get responses that include list comprehensions, lambdas, > map/reduce, etc. These are things people should learn along the road to > Python guru-ness, but if you haven't figured out what a for loop is yet, > those things are just going to confuse you even more. Agreed! Just one WARNING! If you include comprehensions I shall include re's <wink> -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list