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[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3%

Christopher Reay christopherreay at gmail.com
Mon Feb 13 09:50:03 CET 2012 
+1 for the URL in the exception. Well in all exceptions

Bringing the language into the 21st century.
Great entry points for learning about the language.

Whilst google provides an excellent service in finding documentation, it
seems that a programming language has other methods of defining entry
points for learning, being a complex but (mostly) deterministic thing. So
exceptions with URLs. The URLs point to kind of "knowledge base wiki" sorts
of things where the "What is your intent/usecase" can be matched up with
the deterministic state we know the interpreter is in.

With something like encodings, which can be happily ignored by someone
until poof, suddenly they just have mush, finding out things like "Its
possible printing the string to the screen is giving the error", and "There
are libraries which guess encodings" and "latin-1" is a magic bullet can
take many many days of searching.

Also it may be possible, from this perspective, to show ways that the
developer can gather more deterministic information about his interpreter's
state to narrow down his intent for the Knowledge Base (e.g. if its a print
statement that throws the error, its possible the program doesnt have any
encoding issues, except debugging statements)

The encoding issue here is a great example of this because of the
complexity and mobility of encodings (i.e. they ve changed a lot). There
must be other good examples which can fireup equally strong and informative
discussion on "options" and their limitations and benefits.

Id be very interested in formalising the idea of a "KnowledgeBase Wiki
thing", maybe there already is one...
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