On Saturday, May 2, 2020 at 7:12:42 AM UTC-4, Michael Orlitzky wrote: > > On 5/1/20 1:36 PM, John H Palmieri wrote: > > > > So before deprecating, consider points of view of users from different > > backgrounds. We hope that mathematicians are using Sage, and we > > shouldn't require them to know about "grep". Don't get me wrong, grep is > > great and I use it all the time, but I bet that many of my colleagues > > don't know it, don't want to learn the syntax, and would view '!grep -R > > -n ... "$SAGE_ROOT"/src/sage' as an essentially magical incantation. I > > think that 'search_src(...)' is more accessible. > > > > This doesn't have to involve an incantations at all. Grep is already > there (and superior) for anyone who wants to use one, but you're free to > open up a GUI file manager, browse to the sage directory,
You've already lost any Sage user who doesn't understand the structure of Sage, e.g. someone using it only through a notebook. > click a few > things on a drop-down menu, and ask it to search for your string that > way. That's another relatively reusable skill that many people already > know and that solves the same problem on any platform. Grep is really > just a special case of that, "do whatever you would normally do to > search for files containing a string." > I'm not sure that the sort of user we are talking about would think of "search for files containing a string". Ideally we are attracting users who don't know what a string is at all, but want to get some math done. Eventually, yes, for power usage you would want to know that, but to start you can just ape the commands, and later learn that there is a special type of Python thingie in quotes called a string - and learn the difference between raw strings and so forth. Also, search_def is the one I found most useful when learning Sage properly, and the GUI manager method requires people to know the "def" is the word, not "definition" or even "function" or whatever. It's fine if there is a platform-consistent better way to implement it with some sort of alias. But it seems perverse to remove something useful, FINDABLE BY TAB COMPLETION, and instead make people learn to use these other, more tedious or more arcane, methods, when it already exists. It would be sort of like removing a "help()" command in some other program because there is some other way the system can find help files which a power user should know, and which we could bury in documentation somewhere. That's fine for a dedicated user, but one would hope Sage would continue to support even the least dedicated user. The mission statement would indicate we want to. -- 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/44436910-8bd3-44d4-859f-8179f3ead119%40googlegroups.com.
