I certainly didn't take away the right lesson! And lesson well learned, hopefully.
On Tue, Nov 28, 2017 at 12:55 AM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote: > On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 7:22 PM, bunslow <buns...@gmail.com> wrote: > > My first submission to this list was predicated on what I'd read in PEPs > -- > > and many of those, since they recommend major-enough changes to require a > > PEP, have sections (often lengthy) dedicated to "what's wrong with the > > status quo". My attempt to imitate that obviously crossed some > boundaries in > > retrospect, and of course now that it's brought up here I see that > spinning > > it as "what can be done to make it better" is psychologically much more > > effective than "why the current way sucks" (because semantically these > are > > either approximately or exactly the same). But that's where it came > from, at > > least with some of my earlier threads, and I suspect the author of the > topic > > message of the OP will have a similar sentiment. > > To quote Brett's original email: > > So obviously Nick doesn't like the design of the heapq module. ;) And > that's okay! And he's totally within his rights to express the feeling that > the heapq module as it stands doesn't meet his needs. > > But calling it "atrocious" and so bad that it needs to be fixed > "immediately" as if it's a blight upon the stdlib is unnecessarily > insulting to those that have worked on the module. > > You can and should talk about problems with the status quo! But it's > totally possible to do this without insulting anyone. Brett's talking > about tone, not content. > > > (One major example I can point to is PEP 465 -- because it proposed such > a > > major change to the language, literally half its text amounts to "what's > > wrong with the status quo", quantifiably and repeatedly. It was also a > > highly persuasive PEP due in no small part to its "why current things > suck" > > section.) > > Maybe, but you won't find the word "suck" anywhere in that section > :-). And of course, the nice thing about PEP 465 is that it's > complaining about a missing feature, which sort of by definition means > that it's not complaining about anyone in particular's work. > > Nonetheless, an earlier draft of PEP 465 did inadvertently talk about > an old PEP in an overly-flippant manner, and I ended up apologizing to > the author and fixing it. (Which of course also made the PEP > stronger.) It's cool, no-one's perfect. If you think you've made a > mistake, then apologize and try to do better, that's all. > > -n > > -- > Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org >
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