do ya still use python?

[Avi Gross]

Yes, Python is a moving target, as are quite a few such things these days.

The changes when release 3 came along mean that what you find by a search
may not apply to your situation. And as new features get added, some advice
might shift. The presence of so many add-on modules also means that the
simplest way to do something is not to do it but use code that has already
been done and hopefully has been used enough so many bugs have been ironed
out.

Modules and packages of various sorts also can change and I often see a neat
new feature that is later deprecated as it is replaced by a neater or more
abstract version or ...

So it is sometimes worthwhile to put humans back into the process after
searching for something like how to read in data from some file format. I
once wanted to be able to read in data from EXCEL sheets in another language
and spent many hours trying various packages a search suggested but oddly,
one after another did not work for ME. One, for example, required a JAVA
installation different than what I had. Some packages were no longer
available or maintained. Some did not easily do what I wanted. Some worked
with older versions of the EXCEL file formats.  I eventually found one I
liked. But a human with experience might have steered me to something
up-front that was being used NOW by people with minimal problems and that
was compatible.

There is of course much to be said for asking people to show they did SOME
work before bothering others. I always do that if I can guess at what
keywords might help zoom in on useful info. But as the internet continues to
grow, there are too many things found that are not helpful especially when
some search words have alternate meanings as in other human languages. 

But perhaps the purpose of some groups varies. If you want a discussion of
the best way to do something and what the tradeoffs might be or whether it
may be better to use other tools, or which way to add a new feature to your
language and so on, you want different kinds of people involved depending on
the topic. Alan runs a tutorial group of sorts intended to help people who
are often quite new to python. I hung out there a while and realized my
personal interests tended to be in other directions than helping people do
things in simple basic ways. I was way beyond that and interested in what is
more elegant or efficient or uses some novel feature or even how to use
modules already designed for it. But for students in a class wanting a
little hint for their homework, this is often the wrong approach. Maybe
after they have mastered some basics, they might benefit from looking
deeper. But at their stage, searching the internet for answers may not work
well as they may not even know how to ask the right way or be turned off by
some of what they read that assumes they already know much more.

So there really is room for many forums and methods and ideally people
should try to focus on the ones that work better for what they are doing.

-----Original Message-----
From: Python-list <python-list-bounces+avigross=verizon.net at python.org> On
Behalf Of o1bigtenor
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2021 6:07 AM
To: Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu>
Cc: Python <python-list at python.org>
Subject: Re: do ya still use python?

On Tue, Apr 20, 2021 at 6:26 PM Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>
> On 4/20/2021 4:32 AM, Alan Gauld via Python-list wrote:
>
> > We see the same trend on the tutor list, traffic has dropped off by 
> > a factor of 3-5 times what it was at its peak. And the questions are 
> > changing too, fewer basic things about loops and writing functions, 
> > more about specific library modules and such.
>
> I suspect that at least some such questions have good answers on 
> StackOverflow that questioners could profitably read first.
>
Respectfully - - - - I would disagree.
I am finding when I'm looking for answers that the generalist sites most
often cough up responses - - - - - yes there are responses
- - - but those responses are for software of at best 5 to 6 years ago and
all too often its for software of 15 + years ago. Most often those 'answers'
just aren't applicable anymore. Not saying that there never are answers but
I've gotten to including a 'date' in my searching and then there are a not
less links proffered by the search engine!

HTH
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