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by warmfuzzykitten
4867 days ago
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Stop being defensive. He has a point. Python docs can be frustrating. Too many times, docs lead with examples instead of a simple list of functions or methods accompanied by examples. It's true the function/method descriptions are often incomplete; some argument description are only hints, exceptions thrown are rarely stated, etc. He's wrong about getting questions answered. Don't know about the Python community, but the StackOverflow community (and elsewhere) more than makes up for it. It's very rare that I haven't gotten a good answer to a question in the first one or two google responses. Where the author went wrong is trying to outsmart google by directing the query to a particular set of documents, instead of just asking, e.g., 'python length of array'. |
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As for your point regarding the search query: I normally do not filter search results by domain. The reason I filtered them here, was because the article was about the official Python documentation. To quote my elaboration on this that I posted on the Reddit thread:
"My point was that the official Python documentation is poor. I certainly agree that many things are answered on StackOverflow, but imagine that you're looking for something that not very many people use. You'll search on Google, not find any StackOverflow posts (after all, nearly noone uses the thing you're looking for), and you just find a few unclear blog posts and a Python documentation page.
Official documentation is important especially as a fallback when other sources fail to provide the relevant information. As such, the focus of the official documentation should be on complete and clear, unambiguous reference. That's not what the official Python documentation provides.
While len() may be a very simple example (and intentionally chosen for that reason), I've more than once run across things for which basically no documentation could be found aside from an ambiguous explanation in the Python documentation that never got me anywhere."
(source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/18ssb6/the_python_do...)