I'm definitely on the old side of the distribution of programmers, and I strongly appreciate tab expansion in tools like Jupyter and vim. I never used a full "IDE", whatever the boundary line is. But exactly that kind of reminder of e.g. "what's in itertools again?" is very helpful to me, both when I wrote programs and when I teach them.
... But Raymond will always remain a month and a half older than me :-). On Fri, Aug 2, 2019, 10:25 AM Guido van Rossum <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 2, 2019 at 6:38 AM Rhodri James <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 02/08/2019 06:26, Brendan Barnwell wrote: >> > It is massively more discoverable, for one simple reason: >> > autocomplete. >> > >> > In teaching people to program, I often use Jupyter notebook, which >> > has great autocomplete functionality that can also bring up the >> > documentation on any function. You can type itertools.[TAB] and get a >> > list, and then you can scroll down the list looking for a likely >> > function, and when you get to it you can hit Shift-Tab and see the >> > documentation. Certainly other IDEs have similar functionality. >> > >> > This is a colossal win over having to go the documentation and >> look >> > through the text for a recipe that is not "addressable" in any way. >> You >> > can't even link to it, for heaven's sake! The function docs in all the >> > modules have permalinks but the recipes are just unstructured text. >> >> I'd have to challenge that "colossal win". I am very uncomfortable with >> IDEs that try to do my thinking for me, and I start turning things off >> on those occasions when I am forced to use them. It would even occur to >> me to try autocompletion. Reading the documentation is so much easier, >> and far more likely to point me at what the right answer actually is, >> rather than just what I think it might be. >> > > There seems to be a clash of generations here, or perhaps a clash of > different educational paths. I'm in the same boat as you, but Python's > recent success is definitely driven by things like IPython and Jupyter > Notebooks which are optimized for exactly the approach to learning that > Brendan describes. (And make no mistake about it, it is a form of > learning!) I wonder what Raymond thinks (he's the maintainer of itertools > and also an educator). > > PS. Raymond, if you're not reading python-ideas, Brandon's message is > here, and it's well-written: > > https://mail.python.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/URV4E3M6MPP7QZWITYYJZ66ZY3HSSTXH/ > > -- > --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) > *Pronouns: he/him/his **(why is my pronoun here?)* > <http://feministing.com/2015/02/03/how-using-they-as-a-singular-pronoun-can-change-the-world/> > _______________________________________________ > Python-ideas mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ > Message archived at > https://mail.python.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/B5FUOWFXAA3I2P4TFIAL26DH7LU2OWQZ/ > Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ >
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