> others do not and so your notion of what is "accepted" > is not universally shared.
Why should I or anyone else care about what "others" think? The important question is whether what I do is right. And the answer is "yes". That's why there are rules in the first place instead of polling. > if you want to influence anything Usually, when I interact with representatives of Python community I have two goals: 1. Typically, I need to show to someone who's paying my salary why something produced by this community doesn't work. I.e. say, I need to convince a project manager on a project I'm helping maintain that deploying using "pip install" is a bad idea. I write an explanation which I share with the PM and the PyPA people in the bug tracker. They predictably block me out of fear or frustration. This gives me a proof that the thing doesn't work (well), and I'm allowed to do it the right way. Just like in your previous remark: majority could be a good initial heuristic, but proof is still a lot better. 2. At this point, I have no hope of convincing the prominent members of Python community how awful a lot of their decisions are. There are plenty of socially constructed obstacles on this way. The reason I do this is posterity. There are plenty of people who aren't influenced by the internal developments of Python community (outside of it) and they can see much of its development for what it is: commenting on this development honestly will help them make an informed choice. It's also important that those who will come after us will learn about this contradiction. Too many bad projects with bad design outlived their good counterparts due to popularity caused by chance. And today those better design and ideas are as good as lost. For example, Unix outlived and "overpowered" plenty of better operating systems of its time. But most programmers today would have no idea what those systems were and how they were different. Similarly, x86 ISA. And plenty more. Python changed from its early days of trying to be funny and generally welcoming of many contradicting ideas and opinions into a Lord of the Flies community that no longer tolerates differences of opinion. It's lost the spirit of "playful cleverness" (as RMS would put it), and became a "don't think, do as I say" community. I want to make sure those who come to learn about Python will not miss this aspect of its history. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list