I am trying to learn to use siphon. It seems very powerful. Thank you for creating it!

My usual method for learning a new library is to try to introspect the objects via a combination of doc strings, tab completion, etc (in addition to rtfm of course). One challenge with siphon is that it's __repr__ methods for its objects are often insufficiently informative, making it hard to quickly understand the datatypes returned by the different methods. For example.

>>> from siphon.catalog import TDSCatalog
>> cat_url = 'https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/thredds/catalog/avhrr-patmos-x-cloudprops-files/catalog.xml'
>> cat = TDSCatalog(cat_url)
>>> cat
No name found

I would have preferred to see

<siphon.catalog.TDSCatalog 'unnamed catalog'>

Or

>>> for k, v in cat.catalog_refs.items():
>>>     print(k, v)
>>>     break
1979 1979

Here this is especially confusing because k really is a string but v is a siphon.catalog.CatalogRef. Again, a better repr would be

<siphon.catalog.CatalogRef '1979'>

I believe that making these reprs more verbose would make the library easier to use for new users.