On Nov 9, 2009, at 10:02 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:
[Laura]
Experience has shown that when people get used to seeing 'a bunch of
warnings that don't really matter' they either a) turn them off or
b) ignore them, even when they are telling them valuable things that
they should be paying attention to. So constantly spitting out
DeprecationWarnings as soon as something becomes deprecated is a
most excellent way to train people to ignore DeprecationWarnings.
On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 10:39 PM, Antoine Pitrou
<[email protected]> wrote:
Well at least people get a chance to see them. If some people think
the
warnings are useless (even though the messages warn about removal
of a
construct), they won't run a code checker either.
You're misreading Laura. She's not saying that some people choose to
ignore the warnings. She's pointing out that it is a scientifically
known fact that people will *learn to ignore warnings* if they occur
frequently enough, and that once this is learned the warnings have no
effect. Look up Jef Raskin's diatribes against modal dialogs. (Or read
the "cry wolf" fairy tale. :-)
Case in point, Plone collected more and more deprecation warnings over
the years. When Zope started down the DeprecationWarning road, there
were just a few warnings, but people got used to them. After a few
years went by, starting the application server used to emit a truly
hideous amount of warnings. End-users saw these warnings and it was
embarrassing. 3rd party developers using it as a framework saw these
warnings and it just frightened them off. Despite being such a bad
situation, the Plone core developers saw these warnings and did
nothing to fix them, they just learned to ignore the situation when
starting Plone - despite it being a major source of embarassment for
them, everyone just got used to ignoring them (until finally Hanno
took mercy and the led the charge to clean-up the morass).
Andy McKay complained, "Do I really need to see all this? Can we put
this into a unit test that will do something like test --show-
deprecations? Deprecation warnings in products I develop are useful,
but I fear, I like most or just ignoring these logs. If that's the
case we are losing the battle."
http://www.agmweb.ca/blog/andy/1849/
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