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Comment by loblollyboy | Hacker News Reader

Pycharm autocomplete is very good - I don’t know if that is what you mean by autocomplete support

Requests is one of the modules that had more change on 2-3, but being basically the most popular language (for good reason), it’s pretty easy to find documentation for either version. I imagine a lot more than for Phoenix/elixir whatever that is.

I think you’re being difficult for the sake of being difficult. I am not a leet programmer and that is why I use python- it does everything for you very well and no more. If you want more “cruft” pip install cruft

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You might be surprised to see the quality of the docs in the Elixir world: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/Phoenix.html

That looks … like many Python projects? It's slightly prettier than the default Sphinx theme but I'm not seeing anything which wasn't common a decade or two back.

IMO part of the quality here is these docs are generated from comments in the code. All you have to do is document your functions and modules properly, run a command, and you have an entire set of docs.

It reminds me a lot of JavaDocs, although I never used them extensively. I'm also not very aware of how documentation looks in the Python world.

Another interesting thing is the code examples. You write them in the comments as "Doc tests", and they are run and tested like normal tests. This means that all the code snippets are up to date with the latest version of the project (as long as you do test!).

The best part, also imo of course, is that it all works out of the box.

That’s how it works in Python, too. You add text descriptions (docstrings), automatic documentation generated from function/class definitions (comments can add prose), and you can run doctests to test things like examples.

See e.g. https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/index.html and https://docs.python.org/3/library/doctest.html

Very nice, I'm glad to see it elsewhere. Maybe Elixir even took inspiration (or it's just a plain good idea). I'm really surprised that I had never heard of or encountered it, maybe it's just an accepted part of the ecosystem so no one talks about it and/or I assumed everything was written manually. Also haven't used Python professionally which doesn't help.

Yeah, I don't care who came up with it first as much as it spreading widely. We waste far too much time on bad documentation as a field.

> I think you’re being difficult for the sake of being difficult.

Why? I was just trying to get something done that I've done in a variety of different languages already so there's a perfect comparison.

> I imagine a lot more than for Phoenix/elixir whatever that is.

I don't know how you manage to come to Hacker News often enough to find exactly my post to answer to but at the same time managed to have never heard about Phoenix/Elixir. What's the point of coming here if you're not interested in staying current in your field?

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