On 7 Feb 2006 00:27:05 -0800, Raymond Hettinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> There was a pithy Tim Peters quotation to the effect that he was > unpersuaded by language proposals predicated on some hypothetical > average programmer not being smart enough to understand something that > the rest of us find to be basic. The problem is that the average programmer in question isn't hypothetical in this case. I'm a fairly average programmer (better than average compared to my immediate colleagues). I've read every tutorial I can get my hands on, but I have no _memory_ of ever coming across the del keyword, let alone that it is fundamental to Python, and I have no idea what collections school is. I doubtless have read of it at some point, but as no importance has ever been attached to it, I have probably not remembered it. Similarly, I remember slices simply because they are handy, not because I have ever heard of them being fundamental before. (I don't argue their fundamentalness one way or other, it's just that you seem to think that all people who have learned Python have some knowledge of this hugely important feature). The other problem with your use of the quote is that the smartness of the average programmer, or their ability to understand the feature, is not in question. It is their ability to know of the existence of the feature, or to find out about it. As a general rule of thumb, I would say that if a person is struggling with a language, it is primarily a problem with the language, and than problem with the documentation, and lastly a problem with the person. Ed -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list