Jim J. Jewett writes: > > which file am I actually running? > > which interpreter am I actually running? > > how do I tell the computer to use a different interpreter? > > If you need to care about any of these, then the environment is > fighting you -- and the application probably stinks. Programmers > have to deal with it because of bootstrapping, but there is no > reason that we should assume all python users need that flexibility > or want that responsibility.
Be careful! I agree about need for flexibility and desire for responsibility, but in fact these problems present themselves frequently when helping people with their work. "Which file am I actually [edit]ing?" is one that comes up in just about every meeting: documents are undated (or dated with the deadline date), people are looking at different versions, and not infrequently the presenter themself has a Documents/Downloads confusion and gets it wrong. Then "where is the one I want to be editing?" requires an oracle. :-) "Which program am I running?" doesn't come up that often, but it does come up when helping people with "doing something", especially trying to find menu items across major versions. Interestingly enough, "how do I tell the computer to use a different interpreter?" doesn't come up for me outside of Python (and even there rarely) -- everybody who consults me knows how to use "Open With". So I agree with the basic principle that programs should Just Work by default, but it's not always possible. Eg, there's good reason why Downloads and Documents both exist. So it helps to have users know something about implementations and sysadminning stuff, especially when remote troubleshooting. The question for Python is given the history and the plethora of ways to invoke Python and find packages and programs, can we do better with a minimum of backward incompatibility? Humans are generally better at learning this stuff than bags of bits on spinning platters are! _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/OAYWDLL26YTSIFTKGL6LWP7TU4PXUH6K/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
