== A problem with Python's _help()_

I mentioned [[in passing ConsiderObviousInterfaces]] that when I am
poking around an unfamiliar object (well, class), I usually reach first
for _dir()_ and only somewhat later try _help()_. There's several reasons
for this, but one of them is that _help()_ is overly verbose in a useless
way.

The problem is that many objects have a lot of completely standard
methods like ((__repr__)), generally with absolutely no useful
documentation text, and _help()_ will gleefully tell you all about them
(for an example of this, apply _help()_ to itself). The more advanced an
object is, the more such standard methods it will have (to implement all
the protocols that make it a sequence object or whatever) and the more
noise that _help()_ produces.

(And it is a lot of noise; each such member produces two or three lines
of output. This can add up very fast, especially if you use _help()_ on
a module that has a bunch of classes with a bunch of standard methods.)

There's only two interesting things about standard methods; first, what
'protocols' the object supports (is it a sequence object, a callable
one, an iterable one, does it have a string value, etc), and second,
does it do anything unusual for any of them. The first is directly
obvious, and we can guess at the second by seeing if any of the standard
methods have non-standard docstrings.  Thus, _help()_ would be more
helpful if it did not report such generic standard methods individually,
but instead condensed all of them into a single line of information
about what the object supports.

(Note that writing better docstrings can't help the situation; at most
it can drown the noise about standard methods in verbose signal.)