Shiyao Ma <i...@introo.me> writes: > My normal workflow is use ipython, obj? or obj?? for quick look up or > use docs.python.org for a detailed read.
I don't use IPython. I'm glad it exists for those who want it. I frequently use Python on hosts not entirely under my control, where I don't have authority to install new packages, and which only have stock Python installed. So I have to be familiar with IDLE and the standard Python interactive shell. I also find IPython of questionable value when teaching Python to newcomers: its interactive features diverge quite markedly from what is available when writing Python code in a file, so it turns out to be too distracting for someone learning the language. Using the standard Python interactive shell, at least, means what a newcomer learns t the shell is almost entirely transferable to what they need to do to get code into a module's source code. As for the powerful features available in IPython, I find that I get most of them from a Python-aware programmer's editor like Emacs, which also gives me a powerful interactive environment that does more than only Python code. So it would be, IMO, a mistake for me to become too reliant on IPython-specific functionality. It's a high, specific investment that doesn't pay off well on other machines (which commonly don't have it immediately available) or other languages which I need to use. > Do you use `help`? How does it integrate into your workflow? I very often use ‘help(foo)’ at the Python interactive prompt, to get a quick reference to what an object's attributes and features are. There are two common cases where ‘help(foo)’ is unable to help: * If ‘foo’ is a function written without using keyword-only args, but needing to have a bunch of keyword arguments, the signature will often be the uninformative ‘foo(*args, **kwargs)’. A docstring is crucial here, but it's too often wrong or absent. I look forward to more and more functions migrating to use keyword-only arguments for these cases, so the function signature can become much more informative in ‘help’. * If ‘foo’ is a function implemented in an extension (non-Python) module, the signature ‘foo(...)’ is utterly useless. Here, again, the docstring is crucial; and it is frequently just a terse one-liner with no good explanation. Even the standard library is rife with unhelpful function docstrings of this kind. Other than those caveats, I find browsing ‘help(foo)’ output is very helpful in an interactive session, not least for getting information quickly about an unknown object I've generated from some third-party function call. It is a very good feature that ‘help(foo)’ for a class instance shows the help of the class: it can be used indiscriminately, and is thus easier to recommend as a mental habit. > Or instead, what similar tools do you use? I have the ‘python-doc’ and ‘python3-doc’ packages installed locally, and this gives instant access to the whole Python documentation in my browser without any lag or network dependency. The ‘logging’ module is a standard feature and makes it much easier to emit informative debugging statements that (unlike ad-hoc ‘print’ calls) *don't* need to be removed later. Logging can also reveal a lot about the objects while the program is running, as a valuable complement to the ‘help’ feature and online documentation. -- \ “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be | `\ happy.” —Henry L. Mencken | _o__) | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
