Pitfalls for beginners and the value of convenience and hand-holding

Just to reiterate, the specific example I gave was not that important to me, just something I came up with while thinking about the classic errors people make. So I thought, why not try to help as much as possible when errors appear. Nobody in my tutorial will read the official documentation I am sure, the same way they’ve never once read python R or Matlab documentation. All beginners do is execute other people’s scripts and maybe look up help for specific functions, and then maybe try a couple of things themselves. If too many things get in the way of that they are just likely to get frustrated. And again, I don’t think we should take that lightly as a community because resources are diverted to where the users are, even if they’re just doing “basic” stuff. I would love to get as many beginners motivated and on board as possible.

And this is not constrained to error messages, any kind of thing we can do to make things easier for people exploring the language is important. Like this other post I made about better tab completions when working with dataframes for example RFC: Tab completions that are sensitive to already specified function arguments - #3 by jules (inspired by what R offers in that regard)

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