I’ve been working with Python for the past month, and have found it difficult to get really excited about the language. Unfortunately it’s been kind of a chore to learn.

Today I sat quietly for a few minutes and pondered why I was feeling this way in an attempt to kick start my interest in the Python development process.

Here’s what I discovered:

Lack of New Development

I originally came from the wonderful (and now very popular) world of JavaScript, where something new was being created for the JS community everyday, and searching for ‘javascript news’ brings you more than 200,000,000 results on Google.

By contrast, if you search for ‘python news’ in Google, you’re lucky to have 20,000,000 results returned, some of which are actually pictures of pythons eating various animals (or people). There’s just fewer headline worthy projects being built in Python right now.

Difficult to Read Docs

One of the biggest let downs in my relationship with Python have been the lack of quality and easy to read Docs! The Official Python Docs are a dense collection of resources that span multiple versions of the language, seem to have been written by multiple authors, and then haphazardly thrown together.

The material is difficult to parse, and requires a developer to slog though pages of explanations before seeing their first code sample.

This isn’t the case with JavaScript and it’s Docs, which have been massaged and formatted in a way that’s more easily digestible.

Summary

Python is an incredibly powerful and elegant language, that I’ve barely scratched the surface of. However it’s documents and community don’t seem as robust as they could be.