Python 3 is killing Python

[Rick Johnson]

On Thursday, July 17, 2014 5:12:23 AM UTC-5, Fabien wrote:
> For non-informatic students [...] I don't think that's true.
> Less general languages like Matlab appear much easier to
> me: unified doc, unified IDE, unified debugger

I'll agree that the lack of a "quality" IDE in Python is a
point of inadequacy. Sure, IDLE is not *useless*, however, it
is in fact woefully inadequate and should be embarrassing to
the whole community, both in it's buggy-ness and it's poorly
written source code.

I would love to see IDLE become a bit more "polished",
because, i believe that even though the software is outdated
and poorly structured , a simplistic *INTEGRATED* IDE can
be very helpful for new Python programmers who have no prior
programming experience.

Sadly, all of my calls to improve IDLE have been meet with
rebukes about me "whining". The "powers that be" would wise
to *UTILIZE* and *ENCOURAGE* my participation instead of
*IGNORING* valuable talent and *IMPEDING* the expansion of
this "private boys club".

> you can spend years without being confronted to what an
> "object" is, etc.

I believe one could eaisly ignore the OOP aspects of Pyhton
for as long as they wished, maybe even forever? Python is a
multi-paridigm language, and i'm quite happy with that fact

> Some argue that making print() work like all other
> python functions made it more consistent.

Yes, and i agree! Print should have been a function from day
one, however, i am not lamenting the "evolution" of "print",
i am merely lamenting the confusion induced from backwards
incompatibility between "new print" and "old print".

> It happened to me quite often that interesting tutorials
> where available in py2 only, despite the fact that all the
> concerned libraries were ported to py3 long ago. But on
> the other hand, this is not python specific. Forums keep
> track of all questions/answers and some very old threads
> remain highly visible in the search results, making new
> users reinvent the wheel all the time. Everyone should be
> able to decide if the information found on blogs, forums
> or even newspapers is up-to-date or not.

Really? Even noobies?

The internet is a double edged sword (when used to learn any
language) because although there is a vast wealth of
information out there for just about any question a noob
might have, if he does not phrase his google queries "just
so", he is doomed to read information that is at beast
confusing, and at worse just flat out lies.

I wish "we", as members of internet communities, had some
control over the vast amount of information lying around in
the darkest corners of the web. Because, we cannot rely
*solely* on our "official" tutorials to answer every
question a noob may have. And since we cannot control the
content of private sites, blogs, groups, etc..., our only
remedy is some sort of "official filtered search engine"
that will hide the outdated information, and expose only the
most relevant and updated information for the version
requested.

A database where pythonistas can categorize and "up vote" or
"down vote" the value of each piece of information. A sort
of "Stack Overflow" of the entire set of Python related
information violable on the web.

Of course it would need to utilize some heavy crowd
sourcing, but i believe something like this would be both
beneficial and feasible.