Yes, Python is a moving target, as are quite a few such things these days. The changes when release 3 came along mean that what you find by a search may not apply to your situation. And as new features get added, some advice might shift. The presence of so many add-on modules also means that the simplest way to do something is not to do it but use code that has already been done and hopefully has been used enough so many bugs have been ironed out.
Modules and packages of various sorts also can change and I often see a neat new feature that is later deprecated as it is replaced by a neater or more abstract version or ... So it is sometimes worthwhile to put humans back into the process after searching for something like how to read in data from some file format. I once wanted to be able to read in data from EXCEL sheets in another language and spent many hours trying various packages a search suggested but oddly, one after another did not work for ME. One, for example, required a JAVA installation different than what I had. Some packages were no longer available or maintained. Some did not easily do what I wanted. Some worked with older versions of the EXCEL file formats. I eventually found one I liked. But a human with experience might have steered me to something up-front that was being used NOW by people with minimal problems and that was compatible. There is of course much to be said for asking people to show they did SOME work before bothering others. I always do that if I can guess at what keywords might help zoom in on useful info. But as the internet continues to grow, there are too many things found that are not helpful especially when some search words have alternate meanings as in other human languages. But perhaps the purpose of some groups varies. If you want a discussion of the best way to do something and what the tradeoffs might be or whether it may be better to use other tools, or which way to add a new feature to your language and so on, you want different kinds of people involved depending on the topic. Alan runs a tutorial group of sorts intended to help people who are often quite new to python. I hung out there a while and realized my personal interests tended to be in other directions than helping people do things in simple basic ways. I was way beyond that and interested in what is more elegant or efficient or uses some novel feature or even how to use modules already designed for it. But for students in a class wanting a little hint for their homework, this is often the wrong approach. Maybe after they have mastered some basics, they might benefit from looking deeper. But at their stage, searching the internet for answers may not work well as they may not even know how to ask the right way or be turned off by some of what they read that assumes they already know much more. So there really is room for many forums and methods and ideally people should try to focus on the ones that work better for what they are doing. -----Original Message----- From: Python-list <python-list-bounces+avigross=verizon....@python.org> On Behalf Of o1bigtenor Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2021 6:07 AM To: Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> Cc: Python <python-list@python.org> Subject: Re: do ya still use python? On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 6:26 PM Terry Reedy <tjre...@udel.edu> wrote: > > On 4/20/2021 4:32 AM, Alan Gauld via Python-list wrote: > > > We see the same trend on the tutor list, traffic has dropped off by > > a factor of 3-5 times what it was at its peak. And the questions are > > changing too, fewer basic things about loops and writing functions, > > more about specific library modules and such. > > I suspect that at least some such questions have good answers on > StackOverflow that questioners could profitably read first. > Respectfully - - - - I would disagree. I am finding when I'm looking for answers that the generalist sites most often cough up responses - - - - - yes there are responses - - - but those responses are for software of at best 5 to 6 years ago and all too often its for software of 15 + years ago. Most often those 'answers' just aren't applicable anymore. Not saying that there never are answers but I've gotten to including a 'date' in my searching and then there are a not less links proffered by the search engine! HTH -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
