Ben Sizer wrote: > I agree with you that sometimes, the responses here can come across as > a bit condescending. I don't think this is intentional, as everybody > seems friendly enough, but I do see a pattern of people replying to a > query and implying that the original poster should know better than to > ask for whatever they asked, despite the Pythonic solutions suggested > often differing algorithmically from the best solution in other > languages.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html This is a technical newsgroup, and pretty much everything there applies. Fortunately for people who don't know better, comp.lang.python (aka python-list) is much friendlier and less condescending than most other technical forums (I've been involved in quite a few, and c.l.py is easily the best). It is without a doubt though incumbent on anyone proposing new *features* to have a solid understanding of what they are proposing, what it would affect, any backwards incompatibilities, and whether it fits into the python philosophy (import this). Failure to have considered all of these is likely to be shot down in flames. New syntax is especially likely to have unintended consequences that many of us will think should have been obvious if you've used python much. And this is the crux of it - the majority of such proposals come from people who apparently haven't actually used python that much, and are trying to impose things from other languages onto it. There's nothing wrong with bringing concepts across from other languages (look at the "generators" history), but you need to understand how it will fit with python before proposing it as a new feature. Tim Delaney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
