faq/library: remove outdated sections

[deronnax]

I broke it into 3 commits so we can revert some deletion if we wish:

• 1st commit: I don't know who Cameron Laird is, I have never heard of him in 10 years of web development, never been talked about his website, never ran into it when googling python web develoment stuff, and the website has not been updated in ages. It doesn't even mention Django nor Flask. It's so dead it's not linked directly, it's linked through webarchive.org
• 2nd commit: nobody mainstream does web using CGI anymore, for years. This has become a very corner case that does not belong in the FAQ
• 3rd commit: I haven't seen a serial port on a computer for at least 12 years. Same thing than above, of course there must be people on earth who still uses this but it does not belong in the FAQ

In a general matter, I think we should remove links preserved through archive.org. That the page went down and that nobody bothered to generate a reliable copy is a clear marker that the page is no longer relevant in today's world.

A good example of this is Joel's The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). It will be 20 years in few weeks. It has been non-stop alive since then because it has always been relevant, until today, 20 years later.

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[hauntsaninja]

Thanks for helping keep things tidy! I agree that it's valuable to ensure that FAQs are at least somewhat frequently asked.

That said, for pyserial, I'd err on the side of Chesterton's fence and leave it in. pyserial is in the 674th most downloaded PyPI package in the last thirty days, so many people are getting value out of it.

[deronnax]

I accept your reasoning in the condition that the other 673 packages more popular than pyserial also get their own entry in the FAQ ;)

[hauntsaninja]

That's amusing :-)

From my perspective, I don't find this FAQ well correlated with the questions I personally would ask frequently. So to your point, yes, I am using a criterion of "could a reasonable number of people find this existing question useful" and the pyserial mention passes this test.

If I instead used the criterion of "what questions would I frequently ask", I'd end up deleting most of the existing FAQ. This might well worth be doing (at the very least, would benefit future me's), but is a different scope and would require soliciting input from other core devs.

[hauntsaninja]

Thank you for improving this!

[deronnax]

Thank you for considering my work 🙏