Nothing helpful at all. A regular person thinks "take the average" and programmers think "build up a result from a set of primitives, like loops and arrays". Total mental mismatch. Way too low on the abstraction chain, I just want a friggin average.
There is literally no article or tutorial in the python docs explaining how to do this grade school operation. Imagine how frustrated you would be.
In Excel you type average and get inline help in the IDE, an example (you can copy-paste), related functions, etc.
Excel is awful, here's proof: If I open up the documentation for Windows, there's nothing about average.
I hit the Start menu, I type "average(1,4,6,8)", and I get, nothing.
What you like about Excel is that it is an IDE. And IDE that makes simple things simple, and hard things back-asswards (VLOOKUP??? CONCATENATE?? filters)
I must be missing something. Why should Windows OS (or Mac OS, in my case) handle help for an app? When you're in Excel, you get contextual Excel help, and only Excel help (which is a good thing). Do you want every mention of "average" in your email to show up?
Sure, SciPy can take an average (not Python proper). How is the user supposed to know to visit a non-standard Python module site and search there? How about the next commonly used function, like charting. If I search "bar chart" which Python module site should I magically know to visit?
VLOOKUP (Vertical lookup) isn't the best name, sure, but "lookup" is in the name. It's another keyword to learn, like "foreach".
