On Thursday, May 7, 2020 at 9:17:34 AM UTC-4, Michael Orlitzky wrote: > > On 5/7/20 8:45 AM, kcrisman wrote: > > > > Again, I think it is not necessarily the case that users of > > Sage-the-software - say, in a CoCalc-provided notebook as a student - > > necessarily know how to "search a bunch of files for a string" or even > > know that there is such a thing. > > Anyone who wants to search the source code for a string probably knows > that source code and strings both exist, and that one can be searched > for the other. I believe in the user who knows nothing, but I don't > believe that he's interested in search_src() to begin with. (This is the > sort of thing I mean by a peculiar set of disabilities.) > > We can agree to disagree on this, but "search_def()" is super-duper useful and for that one this argument does not apply. Often that was (for me) far quicker than trying to search through the voluminous Sage documentation - and note that the online doc doesn't include *every* method.
> These are both valid concerns. I disagree only in the way we should > address them. Instead of a magic function with a non-standard name that > only kind-of works and that we have to maintain forever, I think these > two cases are better served by some documentation: > > Maybe. In principle I agree with that, but in reality and practice (e.g. the several years I spent helping on ask.sagemath.org on a daily basis), I have found that even the most well-meaning and motivated seekers have a lot of trouble traversing our documentation. (And to be fair, traversing other documentation, though ours is perhaps less well organized than ideal.) If we really had this type of doc - and if it could really deal with some of the issues for GUI/notebook-only users or people who barely know how to use the command line, and was really just as easy to find - then of course it would be fine to deprecate these guys. I'm just really unconvinced that any Sage documentation project will ever achieve that, after many attempts :-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/9c1e2056-4570-4ed8-b943-a7916bfbca72%40googlegroups.com.
