On Wed, May 09, 2018 at 04:56:38PM -0300, Facundo Batista wrote: > 2018-05-09 13:48 GMT-03:00 Rhodri James <rho...@kynesim.co.uk>: > > > -1 until you give me an actual spec rather than a curious example. > > > > Sorry if that sounds a bit rude, but I spend most of my time trying to find > > Be sorry, it was rude.
I do not agree that Rhodri's comments were rude. They were frank and honest constructive criticism of the presentation of your idea. I have no patience with hair-trigger accusations of "rudeness" as a debating tactic to curtail criticism, and your response to Rhodri's mild and fair words looks exactly like that. Whether you intended it that way or not, that is what it looks like to me. I too spent some time scratching my head trying to guess what you expect this "j" format code to do, including the fundamental question "why j and not some other letter?". Even after I worked out some of it, I was still left with questions. So I think that Rhodri's criticism is completely valid: your post was vague, with a lack of detail and not even an attempt to provide a partial specification. That doesn't have to be a formal specification, but it should be at least an attempt to say "this is what the format code means", rather than expect people to guess from a single example. (By the way, if you answered my earlier questions, I haven't seen the answer.) Dealing with under-specified, vague instructions, and the invariable failure to guess correctly what was intended, is frustrating, annoying and painful. We should not be surprised that vague proposals can trigger an angry response, but Rhodri's post showed great restraint. It isn't just the waste of time and effort when when we guess wrong, it is also the implied disrespect: "I am too important to bother explaining myself to minions like you. Work out what I mean." If an idea is important enough to post here, we should be willing to spend some time presenting the idea in sufficient detail so that people don't have to guess what we mean. As the Zen says, "Explicit is better than implicit". No, that doesn't mean that we have to write a PEP before posting. There is a middle-ground between giving a single example and expecting people to extrapolate from it, and writing a full PEP. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
