BeautifulSoup help !!

[Steve D'Aprano]

On Fri, 7 Oct 2016 03:00 am, Chris Angelico wrote:

> You are asking
> for assistance with something that was assigned to you *as a
> recruitment task*. Were you told that asking for help was a legitimate
> solution?

Why should he need to be told that? Asking for help *is* a legitimate
solution, just as legitimate as Reading The Fine Manual, searching on
Google, asking your work peers for mentoring, or doing a training course.

What's next? Are we going to start dumping on people for reading the
manual? "If you can't intuit the right method calls, you're cheating"?


"What, you had to *study* to learn the language? With a teacher and
everything? Cheater!"


Asking questions and sharing expertise is what we're here for, and it is an
absolutely critical part of open-source communities. The idea that people
cannot ask for help because they are working, or being interviewed for
work, should be anathema to us all.

Schooling is slightly different in that (1) whether we like it or not, many
schools enforce ridiculously stupid and strict rules against plagiarism, so
bizarrely the best way we can help students is to refuse to help them[1];
and (2) when people are learning, making their own mistakes and wrong turns
is often a good learning exercise. For students, it is the learning process
itself which is more important than the solution -- and the less
experienced the student, the more that is the case.

But heaven forbid that students copy recipes from the documentation, from
the ActiveState Cookbook, or Stackoverflow without attribution like
professionals do. The current anti-plagiarism (so-called plagiarism)
climate goes directly against the principles of free and open code and
information. Requiring every trivial thought and phrase to be wholly
original[2] or else paid for (whether paid for in money or in credit/
reputation points) is a direct assault against the intellectual Commons.




[1] The negative effects of an accusation of plagiarism for few lines of
allegedly copied code or text may be far, far worse than if the student
actually learns nothing. If you learn nothing, there's at least a chance
that your teacher will grade on a curve and you'll squeeze in a passing
grade, but allegedly plagiarise, even *your own work*[3] and you may lose
all your academic future.

[2] An impossibility.

[3] Quite possibly the stupidest thing that has come out of academia since
post-modernism.




-- 
Steve
“Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure
enough, things got worse.