Question about idioms for clearing a list

[Ed Singleton]

On 7 Feb 2006 07:08:17 -0800, Raymond Hettinger <python at rcn.com> wrote:
> > As a general rule of thumb, I would say that if a person is struggling
> > with a language, it is primarily a problem with the language, and than
> > problem with the documentation, and lastly a problem with the person.
>
> I would swap the first two.  No language has yet been invented
> (including HTML and LOGO) that someone doesn't struggle with.  In
> contrast, no documentation has ever been written that couldn't be
> improved.

(I should clarify that by documentation, I mean external documentation
rather than self-documentation features)

Given the choice of having a language that is hard to use but has good
documentation or one that is easy to use but has bad documentation,
which would you go for?

If you could write the perfect language, would it be so easy to use
(including self-documentation) that no one ever needed to look things
up in external documentation, or would it have such good documentation
that you could always find what you needed in external documentation?

Documentation is there to cover up the cracks in the none-obvious (or
confusing) parts of the language.  Python is starting to show that one
day anything but the most perfunctory documentation may one day become
unnecessary.

Ed