Newbie observations

[MartinRinehart at gmail.com]

Warning! Complaints coming.

The good news is that 10-days of part-time Python coding has convinced
me that I picked the right language. Now, observations.

First, it is absolutely horrible being a newbie. I'd forgot how bad it
was. In addition to making a fool of yourself in public, you have to
look up everything. I wanted to find a substring in a string. OK,
Python's a serious computer language, so you know it's got a function
to do this. But where? Look it up in the function reference. OK,
where's the function reference? A line of code that you'd type in a
second is a ten-minute search. Thank God for google.

Second, would anyone mind if we tossed the semi-colon (which this
newbie is forever forgetting)? I think the language is parsable
without it.

Third, could our classes be a little more selfless? Or a lot more
selfless? The Stroustrup's idea of having the compiler, not the
programmer, worry about the self pointer was an excellent decision.
What was van Rossum thinking?