That’s why we get familiar with the documentation manual and bookmark the web version. Then there’s offline documentation browsers (dash, devdocs,…).

> it is amazing to me that shells still exist in more-or-less the same form

Bash and ZSH are quite good for their use cases (running command). and there are shell like fish that leans more towards interactive use instead of automation. Python’s primitive are not very good for launching commands.

  $ python
  Python 3.13.2 (main, Mar  6 2025, 08:26:01) [Clang 15.0.0 (clang-1500.3.9.4)] on darwin
  Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
  >>> import os
  >>> help(os)

    $ python
    Python 3.13.2 (main, Mar  6 2025, 08:26:01) [Clang 15.0.0 (clang-1500.3.9.4)] on darwin
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> help()
    Welcome to Python 3.13's help utility! If this is your first time using
    Python, you should definitely check out the tutorial at
    https://docs.python.org/3.13/tutorial/.
    
    Enter the name of any module, keyword, or topic to get help on writing
    Python programs and using Python modules.  To get a list of available
    modules, keywords, symbols, or topics, enter "modules", "keywords",
    "symbols", or "topics".
    
    Each module also comes with a one-line summary of what it does; to list
    the modules whose name or summary contain a given string such as "spam",
    enter "modules spam".
    
    To quit this help utility and return to the interpreter,
    enter "q", "quit" or "exit".
    
    help> modules files
    
    Here is a list of modules whose name or summary contains 'files'.
    If there are any, enter a module name to get more help.
    
    compileall - Module/script to byte-compile all .py files to .pyc files.
    filecmp - Utilities for comparing files and directories.
    fileinput - Helper class to quickly write a loop over all standard input files.
    gzip - Functions that read and write gzipped files.
    idlelib.grep - Grep dialog for Find in Files functionality.
    linecache - Cache lines from Python source files.
    netrc - An object-oriented interface to .netrc files.
    pathlib - Object-oriented filesystem paths.
    plistlib - plistlib.py -- a tool to generate and parse MacOSX .plist files.
    shutil - Utility functions for copying and archiving files and directory trees.
    tempfile - Temporary files.
    ...

It’s a good idea to take some time to understand how the official language docs are organized so that you can just jump there straight away and bypass all the noise

There's no reason why you can't set Python to be your shell. Here you go:

  sudo usermod -s /usr/bin/python $USER
  su $USER

But what does this have to do with programming

Is this suggesting that operating a computer via a shell is "programming"

(It's possible to administer a computer running UNIX by using a shell, without knowing any programming languages^1)

"dear god, can i just get a terminal that runs soemthing like Python directly?"

Assuming "dear god" is a figure of speech, who would be the person(s) responsible for delivering on this request

Many years ago, during experimentation, I changed the program launched by init to a program other than a Bourne shell by editing one line of init.c

That "shells still exist in more-or-less the same form" is probably one of the reasons I like them so much

1. Assuming one believes the shell is not a programming language

you can also write shell programs in standalone files!

i’ve been maining `nushell` for about 1.5 years now, and it’s basically this. a real programming language that is designed as a command runner and output parser. i have a ton of scripts that parse output from common commands like `git` and facilitate a ton of shell-based workflows: https://github.com/covercash2/dotfiles/tree/main/nuenv

I do have this problem as well, I've just started a job with Ruby and it took too many searches until I could find the official docs for some kind of syntax.

For Python I feel it's easy to find stdlib docs, but can be hard to find some specific things about the language itself in the official docs - sometimes it's too technical and I wish there was a more pragmatic middle ground.

the other day, the example that made this top-of-mind, was looking up the python string formatting options. Google found https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html which is a giant wall of text that I should not have to read all of just to find a reference. Plus it has the fucking formal grammar--who cares!? I just want a lookup table. But this is my experience every time I try to do anything. I always end up going back to https://learnxinyminutes.com/python/ because at least it just lists all the information I want! Of course if I programmed Python every day, which I haven't in a while, then a lot of this would be preloaded in my mind... but seriously, just make a damn reference, it's not hard. Python seems to constantly conflate "full technical specification" with "quick reference materials". Which, fine, if time and energy were no limitations, would be equivalent. But sometimes you just want to know the answer to a simple question in less than 30 minutes.

It's bad because it's missing most of the information it should have. look at https://www.w3schools.com/css/css3_flexbox.asp for instance, it has none of the reference materials it should have about flex, yet it is in the top 5 google results for "css flex". it's completely useless as a reference (or for learning, really). compare to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme... which actually has the information on it, albeit in an annoying tutorial format.

   claude mcp add context7 -- npx -y @upstash/context7-mcp