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 njs@pobox.com wrote:
On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 7:22 PM, bunslow bunslow@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