[Cialug] How many people are using Python ?

[Colin Burnett]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 11:03 AM, Jeffrey Ollie <jeff at ocjtech.us> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 10:39 AM, Colin Burnett <cmlburnett at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> My biggest complaint about python is the documentation.
>
> Really?  I've always thought that the "core" documentation was pretty
> decent.  I don't know if I'd call it "great" but I've seen worse.

Two recent examples.

1) I wrote an amazon web service app that pulls down my wish list and
maintains a price database for those items.  I hit an issue where my
socket was hanging but not timing out (it would hang for hours on
end).  Following the object types was impossible by the documentation
so I had to dig into the source code to know what's really going on.
Alas, I never found a way and wrapped it in a try-catch and retried on
a ctrl-c.  Sad.

2) I'm writing a simple template engine that uses xml.dom.minidom and
I discovered that it would eat entity references (e.g., "&mdash;") and
put nothing in the DOM but it would take numerical entities (e.g.,
"&#8212;") just fine.  I still don't have an answer on that one nor
how to put in literal text (try putting in "&mdash;" as a text node
and you get "&amp;mdash;" on the output).

In fairness, I can't name a single example of "good" documentation.
Probably [near] the top of the list is the C# docs at MSDN but that
has blatant problems as well.


Colin