BartlebyScrivener wrote: > You are correct about the tutorial. Just try to look at the home page > through the eyes of a curious Windows user who wants to learn > programming and is trying to decide whether to take up Perl, Ruby, > Python, or Visual Basic, let's say. > > On the home page, the first link that catches the eye for this user is: > "Beginner's Guide to Programming - <bold> start here if you're new to > programming </bold>." That's me. Click. > > Now you are on a page with promising-looking links that all start with > "BeginnersGuide," but the first three are not warm welcomes, they are > housekeeping matters about where you can take courses or how to > download Python for people who don't know whether they want to or not > yet, or there's one that says "examples" which will take you to the > ActiveState Cookbook site so you can get really confused. > > Then you hit the link that says "BeginnersGuide/Nonprogrammers" Ah! > That's me. <click> > > The first prominent link says: "Python Tutorial" along with a notice at > the top of the page that tells you if you've never programmed before > this is the page for you. > > Click on Python Tutorial. Some official business to start off. Then you > see, "Whetting Your Appetite" Ah, I am ready for that. <click> > > The first sentence reads: > > "If you ever wrote a large shell script, you probably know this > feeling: you'd love to add yet another feature, but it's already so > slow, and so big, and so complicated; or the feature involves a system > call or other function that is only accessible from C ...Usually the > problem at hand isn't serious enough to warrant rewriting the script in > C; perhaps the problem requires variable-length strings or other data > types (like sorted lists of file names) that are easy in the shell but > lots of work to implement in C, or perhaps you're not sufficiently > familiar with C." > > Most of the site has been laid out by programmers, for programmers, who > apparently want to keep it that way, based upon what I've seen. > I think the Python community as a whole should take this on board as fair criticism. It would be really nice if a total beginner did actually see a usable path through the web to their first working Python program.
regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC www.holdenweb.com PyCon TX 2006 www.python.org/pycon/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
