Newbie observations

[Steven Bethard]

MartinRinehart at gmail.com wrote:
> 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.

If you're having trouble with some of Python's basic syntax (like 
slicing), you should go through the tutorial first:

     http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html

It doesn't take too long, and you'll hit slicing by section 3.1.2.

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

What are you using them for?  They're only intended to separate two 
simple statements on the same line.  I always use one statement per 
line, so I never see semi-colons.  I highly recommend that you never use 
semi-colons either.

> 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?

http://www.python.org/doc/faq/general/#why-must-self-be-used-explicitly-in-method-definitions-and-calls