A lot of the traffic on this email list is people saying “I don’t understand” or “that’s not what I meant” or trying to re-explain. A lot of “-1”s are really “I don’t see the usefulness of this”. So I want an open discussion on: How can we communicate clearer?
That's a nice question ! The main thing is "is this list more EmailLike or MessengerLike" When I speak on Messenger (or any instantaneous conversation software) I send a lot of very small messages, like "+1", it's interactive, I'm expecting a short answer. If I say something stupid, I undo, if I can't undo because the delay of my client is done, I send another message beginning with "Oops" or something obvious. It's the EAFP (Easier to ask for forgiveness than Permission) style. The point is "looking ar my first few words, people understand the message" When I speak on TraditionalDifferedEmail, I'm more like LBYL (Look before you Leap), I write a long, but structured message, such that people see first the structure, (intro, body, conclusion), and look in the message if they want. On Fri, 1 Feb 2019, 17:40 James Lu <jamtlu@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 06:21:07PM +0100, Robert Vanden Eynde wrote:
That's a nice question !
The main thing is "is this list more EmailLike or MessengerLike"
This is a perfect example of the problem that James is referring to. I honestly cannot tell if you are being rhetorical, or if you are so technically naive that you genuinely don't know that this is an email mailing list rather than instant messenger or IRC or some other form of instantaneous chat. [...]
That doesn't sound like the sorts of messages you have been sending here recently. https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-January/055022.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-January/055028.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-January/055032.html I don't mean this as a criticism of such short posts. Sometimes all that needs to be said is a single sentence. But when you describe your posting style one way, but actually post another way, that is precisely the sort of confusing lack of clarity that this thread is about. -- Steve
Both :p Newcomers that never spoke on a forum are sometimes lost, they don't see the structure. Therefore I'm helping those newcomers, and the old timer will be like "yeah, he technically defines terms that are obvious for me". When I was a newcomer on this list, I was lost, people said things like "don't up post" or "don't put the answer below" or "answer inline" in a jargon I didn't know about. I'm CS teacher, and I see everyday that things not said explicitly create misunderstanding to newcomers.
Yep, depending on the thread, I'm either type EAFP or LBYL, and I think people can easily guess which type :) (long message = LBYL). However, I don't always "read myself two times" before I send (because of my EAFP nature) so my last mail for example was LBYL but has some spelling mistakes. -- And I guess people will ask if they are not sure. I don't mean this as a criticism of such short posts. Sometimes all that
needs to be said is a single sentence.
Agreed !! But when you describe your
posting style one way, but actually post another way, that is precisely the sort of confusing lack of clarity that this thread is about.
Indeed, mixing standards is bad, but on the other hand, people can think "Robert is Eafp", "Robert is more LBYL when writing long messages")
I'm kinda new to those mailing lists and those are the only ones I ever subscribed so I'm a bit in the audience you're targeting James. What I think is bad using mailing list it's the absence of votes. I'd often like to just hit a "+1" button for some mails just to say to the author I'm with him and I think s.he's ideas are great. In some of the recent threads, some of the ideas I agreed with were just smashed by others. I couldn't give my two cents and the debate juste ended and I couldn't say the author I was behind him.er. Another thing I think is not good is the absence of little chit-chat and editing. Actually, a lot of emails are just explanations of what the authors meant. That's pretty spammy and a few messages exchanged + editing would correct this spammy thing. In another hand, I think mailing lists are great to avoid short and useless messages. There's no spammy message like "I'm ok" which could be replaced by just a "+1" button. It forces us using LBYL principle (@poke Robert) and it (imho) better fills the needs of such discussions. As you may have get it, I'd rather a forum like thing rather than mailing lists but mailings lists are great. Le ven. 1 févr. 2019 à 18:22, Robert Vanden Eynde <robertve92@gmail.com> a écrit :
On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 12:43 PM Adrien Ricocotam <ricocotam@gmail.com> wrote:
I feel like the strongest virtue of mailing lists is the absence of votes. Various chat systems where you can add a "thumbs up" or "smile" or the like encourage laziness and content-free interaction. On a mailing list, for the most part, we encourage people to formulate complete opinions supported by reasons and arguments. That is what python-ideas should be. It should not be a democracy or a voting system. That said, obviously sometimes people do just reply with +1 to something. I do that myself at times. There are times when that really is an appropriate reply, but I think it should be discouraged as the default answer style. Yours, David... -- Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
+1 votes hardly add anything to a technical discussion, and in the contrary, can and do easily lead to a dysfunctional decision style. If you agree with someone else's idea, you probably have some rational arguments behind it, some hard evidence that has not yet been discussed and that could change the course of the discussions. If you can't come up with even a single reason why you like a proposal, probably you didn't think too much about, and so, your +1 would be an uninformed vote. And last, this list is not a decision instance for python, it is just a place where people can share ideas about it, but the final decisions are not meant to be taken here. Em sex, 1 de fev de 2019 às 15:49, David Mertz <mertz@gnosis.cx> escreveu:
-- Marcos Eliziário Santos mobile/whatsapp/telegram: +55(21) 9-8027-0156 skype: marcos.eliziario@gmail.com linked-in : https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliziario/
+1 votes hardly add anything to a technical discussion, and in the contrary, can and do easily lead to a dysfunctional decision style. If you agree with someone else's idea, you probably have some rational arguments behind it, some hard evidence that has not yet been discussed and that could change the course of the discussions. If you can't come up with even a single reason why you like a proposal, probably you didn't think too much about, and so, your +1 would be an uninformed vote. And last, this list is not a decision instance for python, it is just a place where people can share ideas about it, but the final decisions are not meant to be taken here. Em sex, 1 de fev de 2019 às 16:02, Marcos Eliziario < marcos.eliziario@gmail.com> escreveu:
-- Marcos Eliziário Santos mobile/whatsapp/telegram: +55(21) 9-8027-0156 skype: marcos.eliziario@gmail.com linked-in : https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliziario/
Email Can be fast, as long as it is structured. The list only impose the structure of "Thread" ie. Two mails are in the same thread if they have the same subject. Each thread can have it's own format. Email use the quoting mechanism using leading ">" ane generally people do not like html (switch to TextOnly in your mail client if it helps you). Therefore inline images are not used often (one prefer). In the end, anyone can see the list of email, by date, or by thread, on https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-February/thread.html On Fri, 1 Feb 2019, 18:42 Adrien Ricocotam <ricocotam@gmail.com wrote: couldn't say the author I was behind him.er.
Did you use inclusive writing ? :D do you speak French ? :D Generally I suggest using the middle dot, "·" easily accessible by copy paste, or by long pressing the "-" key on android.
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 06:42:33PM +0100, Adrien Ricocotam wrote:
I'm kinda new to those mailing lists and those are the only ones I ever subscribed so I'm a bit in the audience you're targeting James.
Hi Adrien, I see that you first posted in November and haven't posted since.
That sounds pretty spammy to me. The last thing I want to see is something (either technology or culture) encouraging people to flood the list with a bunch of content-free "+1" or "metoo!" messages. The occasional "I agree but have nothing else to say" message is okay, but I wouldn't want to see fifty a day. This isn't Facebook or Reddit, where +1 Likes cause messages to move to the top of your feed. (And thank goodness for that.) This is a technical mailing list where the worth of a proposals usually depends on merit, not the number of votes.
I see that the Reply button on your email client does work, so you clearly *can* give your two cents worth (which is exactly what you are doing now). And the nature of email is that you can reply to any message in your inbox, no matter how old. You can reply to a ten year old message provided you still have it available in a mail folder, resurrecting the thread. Whether it is polite to resurrect such long-dead threads, or whether anyone else will respond, are separate questions. I realise that sometimes people are busy and cannot reply immediately to a discussion. There have been times that I have not been able to respond to a thread until long after it has faded away naturally, and I have *chosen* to not respond because I decided that the discussion had been settled and I didn't care enough to restart the discussion. (Sometimes a discussion settles to "nobody can decide so the status quo wins". See Nick Coghlan's blog.) But within reason, if you have something well thought out and/or important to say, you can and should just reply to a post and say it.
Another thing I think is not good is the absence of little chit-chat
This mailing list is often too busy as it is, without encouraging chit-chat. "Hi Bob, how are the wife and kids? I've been pretty good myself, thanks for asking, but my old injury has been aching a bit. Did I ever tell you the story about that, its quite funny. What do you think of Trump's latest shocking comment? Did you see that hilarious video about a cat? Did you learn the latest trick that doctors don't want you to know? Oh, I nearly forgot, your proposal for adding GOTO to Python and removing for-loops is an awesome idea, +1."
I'm confused. First you complain that "a lot of emails are just explanations of what the authors meant". That's a *good* thing, surely. This is a technical discussion list, and if a message is unclear, then explaning what you meant should make it more clear. And then you say "a few messages exchanged ... would correct this" but what do you think those messages exchanged would be if not explanations of what the authors meant?
Which does what? Send a +1 email to a thousand people? That's pretty spammy.
Mailing lists and web forums each have their advantages and disadvantages, but in general, I find web forums far noisier and of less value. In the future this list may be migrated to Mailman 3 which includes a more modern web-forum-like interface as well as email. http://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/userguide.html As I understand it, there have already been a few low-volume Python mailing lists migrated to Mailman 3, and if they end up being successful eventually the rest will follow. -- Steve
[Steven D'Aprano]
Since I just (almost simultaneously with this post) suggested giving Reddit a try, I feel obligated to defend it a little bit. 1) You might be right. It might result in lower quality discussions, but it seems like a very low barrier to entry to at least try and see. 2) You can control, to some degree, what gets to the top of your feed. In an email list, it's based on who posted last which seems hardly an improvement. 3) There are well moderated and/or cultivated subs like www.reddit.com/r/science where the votes end up being a good approximation to merit. [Steven D'Aprano]
In the future this list may be migrated to Mailman 3 which includes a more modern web-forum-like interface as well as email.
http://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/userguide.html Can you summarize what mailman3 brings to the table? The docs aren't very clear and have a lot of preamble. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 12:39 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On 2/1/19 1:01 PM, Abe Dillon wrote:
[...]
A mailing list is not a feed. Whoever posted last ends up at the bottom of the thread, so that I can read threads from top to bottom in chronological order. Getting the last word in shouldn't earn a spot at the top of the list. In my email client, I do, in fact, have complete control over what gets to the [logical] "top of the list"; in a web-based forum, I have only what the forum allows.
Because the moderators understand the merit(s) of who is behind every +1 vote, or because only approved voters are allowed to vote? Dan, a decades and decades long fan of mailing lists and real email clients
[Dan Sommers]
A mailing list is not a feed... Dan, a decades and decades long fan of mailing lists and real email clients.
I'm only familiar with Gmail which keeps reply chains coherent and moves each chain to the top of my "forums" tab based on who responded last. I haven't explored the various email clients available, can you suggest one? [Dan Sommers]
That doesn't like any closer an approximation to a merit-based solution to me. [Dan Sommers]
Part of it has to do with the subject matter. the python subreddit <https://www.reddit.com/r/python> also has, I would say, higher quality than average discussion just like the PBS Space Time YouTube channel <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKzgpt4HBU> is one of the few places on YouTube where the comments don't generally make you abandon hope for the future of humanity. A lot of it has to do with rules put in place and enforced by the moderators. They cultivate a higher quality community by promoting a higher standard of interaction. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 1:34 PM Dan Sommers < 2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE@potatochowder.com> wrote:
On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 7:59 AM Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com> wrote:
Maybe not, but it's consistent. You can easily scan through a thread in the order it was posted. Anything that allows things to be upvoted above other things specifically encourages you to read only the most-upvoted answers. That works for Stack Overflow, since individual answers are meant to be coherent and self-contained, and have their own comments threads; it does not work for extended discussions (which is why SO specifically discourages extended discussions in comments). Got any ideas for a "merit-based" ordering? Or: got any definition of "merit" that would actually be useful to this style of discussion? ChrisA
[Chris Angelico]
Maybe not, but it's consistent. You can easily scan through a thread in the order it was posted.
That's true in the case of a subreddit conversation too. I wouldn't suggest a system that doesn't let you see the whole conversation. You can order comments by post-time if you think that's relevant for whatever reason. [Chris Angelico]
Anything presented in a list format specifically encourages you to read only the things at the top of the list. I haven't read discussions from 2012 because they're way down the list and I only joined python-ideas recently. A voting system is simply an attempt to make sure the stuff at the top of the list is more relevant than the stuff at the bottom. [Chris Angelico]
it does not work for extended discussions (which is why SO specifically discourages extended discussions in comments).
Why not? I've seen it work many times for extended discussions just fine. [Chris Angelico]
Got any ideas for a "merit-based" ordering?
Yes, a voting system. [Chris Angelico]
Or: got any definition of "merit" that would actually be useful to this style of discussion?
No. Merit is very hard to define, but again, there are subreddits with well curated discussions and in those subreddits, the voting system seems to be a decent approximation for merit. Even in less well-curated subreddits, the voting system seems to be a decent approximation to merit. I mean, the platform exists. We don't have to rely solely on theory in hypothetical land. It's kind-of like discussing whether an encyclopedia based on user-generated content could ever be useful. It's not even hard to make a subreddit. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 3:06 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On 2/1/19 2:58 PM, Abe Dillon wrote:
I used mutt for a long time, and then claws-mail, and now thunderbird. They all met my needs, although I did give up on claws-mail when I got a hidpi display (claws-mail based on gtk2, which doesn't grok hidpi displays). Another point in favor of email clients over web pages is that there are many of them, and *you* control the display and other preferences rather than whoever wrote the forum or owns the server. then to display higher scoring messages "above" the others, or not display certain messages at all. Personally, I don't use the automated systems, but they're very comprehensive (arguably too complicated), and again, *user* adjustable. In an optimal technical discussion, opinions from users don't count for anything. The ideas stand on their own merits and research and metrics; users only serve to confirm the methodology. Dan
[Dan Sommers]
There is a tool called the Reddit Enhancement Suite or RES (and probably others) That lets you control a great deal of the display and other preferences, however; I'm not sure how that control compares to something like Thunderbird. One thing that's nice about Reddit is you can link to posts, so if you've already discussed something at length in another thread, you can simply refer to that discussion. [Dan Sommers]
A lot can be said about how an ideal world would work. Ideally, we could define the meaning of life and good and evil and we wouldn't need this clumsy system of laws and courts to approximate the whole mess. I don't think it's that crazy to think that a voting system might approximate merit a little better than the timestamp on a post. It's not going to be perfect, but perfect shouldn't be the enemy of better. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 3:17 PM Dan Sommers < 2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE@potatochowder.com> wrote:
I have absolutely no interest in any system that arranges comments in anything but related thread and chronological order. I DO NOT want any rating or evaluation of comments of any kind other than my own evaluation based on reading them. Well, also in reading the informed opinions of other readers. I would find it useless if not actively counterproductive to follow any system where such ratings of comments existed. There is one property that every system invented to supercede email have in common. They are all dramatically worse in almost every way. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 5:09 PM Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com wrote:
Simple tools, free-format are always more conductive to the free exchange of ideas. Let's not forget that a huge chunk of our current science and math was built with scientists collaborating over physical mail delivered by sailboats across the channel, train and even horse carriages. Em sex, 1 de fev de 2019 às 22:20, David Mertz <mertz@gnosis.cx> escreveu:
-- Marcos Eliziário Santos mobile/whatsapp/telegram: +55(21) 9-8027-0156 skype: marcos.eliziario@gmail.com linked-in : https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliziario/
To be clear. Most of what I don't want is a system where OTHER people are relying on ratings rather than careful reading. I want to communicate on changes where posts cannot be "voted up" or edited, etc. Mind you, I do know this other than this sort of discussion had other needs. GitHub issues are very useful. Occasionally I'll even go back and edit a prior comment rather than add another. But there I'm trying to make the issue genuinely correctly describe the issue at hand. Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange are very useful for finding technical answers. Voting up best response there is extremely useful. I do not want python-ideas to resemble those. It is simply not the appropriate kind of discussion. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 7:30 PM Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com wrote:
[David Mertz]
To be clear. Most of what I don't want is a system where OTHER people are relying on ratings rather than careful reading.
In my experience, there's nothing you can do to make other people read anything carefully. Plus, many of the counterpoints have been "I have a lot more freedom in filtering and organizing emails with my email client", so I fear your dreams of forcing everybody to read everything will never be realized. As I've pointed out before, putting things in chronological order doesn't force people to read anything, it just favors new over old. I haven't read any of the discussions before 2016 (save a few). [David Mertz]
The ability to edit in discussions is useful for the exact same reason. I have to say. I've frequented Reddit for years and never had to deal with a disingenuous edit. I think that fear is a bit overblown. [David Mertz]
I find it very useful for discussion. I don't know why people keep declaring it's no good for discussion without explaining why. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 6:37 PM David Mertz <mertz@gnosis.cx> wrote:
Typical technical discussion in threaded discussion foruns --First Post -- First Level -- First level with an interesting idea (let's do B?) -- 2nd level discussing some potential issues with B -- 2nd level workaround for said issues, namely, making sure D -- 2nd level more discussion -- 2nd level add nausean -- 3rd replied by mistake last poster, not parent thread -- 3rd some are answering here now -- 2nd another guy answering ad nausean here -- 2nd unrelated thoughts -- 2nd discussion continues on the parent level, but some answers are buried on the level below "ad nausean -- a consensus is found! -- Yeah, let's do B, but taking care of D -- bla bla bla .... .... -- Hey, what if we did B? -- all over again......... Em sex, 1 de fev de 2019 às 22:30, Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com> escreveu:
-- Marcos Eliziário Santos mobile/whatsapp/telegram: +55(21) 9-8027-0156 skype: marcos.eliziario@gmail.com linked-in : https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliziario/
[Marcos Eliziario]
Is this intended to make forums look better or worse than the typical Python-ideas thread. My experience has been: -- First Post -- Counterpoint A -- I'm -1 on this -- Counterpoint A -- Counterpoint A -- Counterpoint B -- Counterpoint A -- I'm -1 on this -- Counterpoint A ... On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 6:38 PM Marcos Eliziario <marcos.eliziario@gmail.com> wrote:
It’s very demotivating to hear just negative feedback on this list. Was starting this thread useful for y’all?
On Sat, Feb 02, 2019 at 10:57:40AM -0500, James Lu wrote:
It’s very demotivating to hear just negative feedback on this list.
Was starting this thread useful for y’all?
Do you want an honest answer, or positive feedback? ("It was great!") Personally, no, it wasn't useful for me. It was a major time-sink to read a large number of emails mostly arguing about the pros and cons of email versus web forums, the value of Like buttons, and whether or not you can access Reddit outside of a browser. But when you get down to the fundamentals, none of these matter for effective communication. We can write lazy, confusing, knee-jerk posts on Reddit just as easily as via email. (If anything, the easier the medium for communication, the lazier, more confusing and more knee-jerk we will be.) As far as I can tell, I was the only person who actually tried to provide some concrete suggestions for communicating clearly. Although it is still only early days, maybe others will give their own suggestions over the next few days. (Come one guys, don't let me be the only one answering James' direct question.) Apologies if I missed other people's insights on clear communication. I did go back through the thread looking, but perhaps I didn't look closely enough. -- Steven
On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 7:07 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Sorry Steve, but I didn't answer his question because this whole thread has become nothing but noise, and I'm trying not to contribute any further to it. Which I'm doing here, by saying that no, it was not a useful thread. Mea culpa. ChrisA
Was starting this thread useful for y’all?
For now no, but it could. There's a tradeoff to have between the advantages of new social medias and their disadvantages. Since it's 50/50 or even 70 bad, 30 why not, we will probably keep mails. But some points have been said and were important. I especially think about the message <https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-February/055204.html> of Steve and some suggestions about welcoming new-comers with a message to help them a bit. Last thing that was important to me and non-english speakers was to say it was not always easy to understand, despite we speak well and that some behaviors might just be a mis-understanding rather than something else. Le dim. 3 févr. 2019 à 09:41, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> a écrit :
On Sat, 2 Feb 2019 at 23:38, James Lu <jamtlu@gmail.com> wrote:
It’s very demotivating to hear just negative feedback on this list.
Was starting this thread useful for y’all?
In the interests of clear communication, no it wasn't. In the interests of trying not to be *too* demotivating, the reason is that it was far too general a question, and it was almost entirely about how people behave, which is a sensitive topic, and not one that's well suited to the medium of email. So people ended up digressing and debating minor off-topic points, because it's bluntly too hard to come up with a polite, clear explanation, suitable for an email, of why certain people's writing styles are hard to work with (and even if someone did that, it's just stating the problem - proposing a solution is a whole order of magnitude more work). Very few people have the time or the inclination to put a lot of effort into carefully reasoned, well thought through emails. It's too much like writing an essay or a report. But that's what's needed when discussing a complex proposal. And "discussing complex proposals" is essentially the whole point of this list (as I see it). "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if we could do X" is *not* the intended use of the list, and it's precisely those partially (or even not at all) thought out postings that generate the most frustrating, least clear, conversations. Paul
I think we need to step away from the egalitarian ideal and have some way of knowing that Python committees are python committers. It’s really difficult to know how well your proposal is doing without having this.
On 2/2/2019 10:59 AM, James Lu wrote:
I think we need to ... have some way of knowing that Python committees are python committers. It’s really difficult to know how well your proposal is doing without having this.
That has occurred to me also. If two or three core developers respond negatively and none favorably, the proposal is likely dead, at least in its initial form. On bug.python.org issues, we are marked with the blue and yellow Python snakes. The sidebar has a link Committer List. If I click it when logged in, I see a list of 173 people (most inactive). This will not include Committers not registered on the tracker. Not logged in, I see the first batch of all 20000+ registered users, which seems like a bug. I don't know what you would see. There are perhaps 10 core developers who currently read the list with any regularity. On today's messages, besides myself, I recognize Stephen D'Aprano, Ronald Oussoren, Paul Moore, Antoine Pitrou, and Eric V. Smith. -- Terry Jan Reedy
On 2/1/19 4:07 PM, Abe Dillon wrote:
Mailman keeps an archive of all email sent to the python mailing list, and the individual messages have unique links. Usually, referring to a discussion by the subject of the email messages and some sort of date range is enough for someone to find the relevant discussions in the archive. I agree that it's not painless. After a while, I end up with my own "archive" in my email client (or in my email server), and I can reply to old messages as needed. This is also not painless.
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 01:01:06PM -0600, Abe Dillon wrote: [...]
In any serious, non-toy mail client you can sort your mail by any of Date, Size, Sender, Receiver, Thread or Subject line. More powerful mail clients should allow automatic filtering of messages into subfolders, hiding or muting threads, and displaying or hiding messages based on text searches. I've seen some that also allow you to add your own custom topics, like "Work", "Personal" etc. The bottom line is that email can be sorted, filtered, shuffled, sliced and diced in an almost infinite number of ways. If your email client isn't good enough, blame the tool, not the technology. [...]
The link was intended as a starting point for people to do their own research, not a finishing point. But the main things from my perspective are: - stable web URLs for archives; - better searching; - a web interface that allows posting as well as reading posts. My guess is that most people who aren't happy with email will care about the web interface, Hyperkitty. https://pypi.org/project/HyperKitty/ https://duffy.fedorapeople.org/presentations/libreplanet%202014/Hyperkitty2.... Demo: https://lists.stg.fedoraproject.org/archives/ -- Steve
[Steven D'Aprano]
There's no reason a forum system couldn't accommodate sorting, filtering, shuffling, slicing and dicing. It seems the only problem is the lack of tools. [Steven D'Aprano]
Thanks! I followed the link and was pretty lost by about half-way through the page. This clears things up! One thing I will say is that Reddit's search functionality has been pretty useless in my experience. It would be nice to have a useful search. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 4:27 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
[Chris Angelico]
With emails, you get your choice of tools. With web forum systems, you get the forum host's choice of tools.
There are many 3rd party tools for interacting with Reddit. It's all just data behind an API. There's no reason you couldn't have a choice of tools for a forum system. The biggest difference I see is that email APIs are more standardized. Maybe we should push for an open standard for forum-style communication. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 5:03 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
Email is based on open standards with multiple implementations, most of them open source, that you can run basically wherever you want. Reddit is a product from a company, with a privately controlled API, and that may not even be here tomorrow, and it is not based on open standards. What happens if Reddit goes bankrupt tomorrow? And let's not forget that mailing lists have a small barrier to entry. Moving this list to a forum would likely become an "eternal september" kind of event. Simple is good. Email is simple. Em sex, 1 de fev de 2019 às 21:17, Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com> escreveu:
-- Marcos Eliziário Santos mobile/whatsapp/telegram: +55(21) 9-8027-0156 skype: marcos.eliziario@gmail.com linked-in : https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliziario/
[Marcos Eliziario]
That's a good point. I suggested Reddit because it has a pretty extensive feature list and is fairly simple to set-up and try. Maybe we could make /r/python_thoughts instead of /r/python_ideas to denote the separation (i.e. nothing posted on /r/python_thoughts will be automatically shared on the python-ideas email list or vice-versa) or maybe there's some forum software based on open standards that has a similar feature set? Or maybe there are no open standards for internet forums, in which case, how would one go about advocating for such a thing? [Marcos Eliziario]
Simple is good. Email is simple.
Simple *can* be good, but it *can* also get in the way of fruitful conversation... On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 5:26 PM Marcos Eliziario <marcos.eliziario@gmail.com> wrote:
@Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info>'s big answer Hi, thanks for this complete answer. I might have been a bit confusing so i'll clear some details ;) I sent about 3 mails (may be 4) in this mailing list and the python dev's one. If I sent those emails it's because I felt legitimate to give my opinion, ie : I had enough knowledge to actually have an opinion and the arguments I had were (imo) relevent. In many subjects I actually have an opinion but not the knowledge to argument. That's what I was trying to express : mailing lists are kinda hard for newcomers.
I'm not suggesting to actually send emails. I was more refering to reddit's possibility of voting and we couldn't do it on mails. Ofc, don't send a mail to 1k people for a "+1", that's exactly what I'm saying : I'm not gonna send an email to say "I agree" full stop.
That's not what I was suggesting either but I get it's confusing. The votes I was talking about have no values of popularity it's just "agree", "disagree", "neutral" like we would find in "classical" forums (this <https://zestedesavoir.com/forums/sujet/544/mettons-en-musique-la-communaute/> is an example of what I'm talking about, french site).
But within reason, if you have something well thought out and/or important to say, you can and should just reply to a post and say it.
That's a point for mailing lists.
That's probably the most unclear point of my first mail ! On a forum (no matter the form), you can edit the original post. Thus, when something was unclear, false or needed an edit, the author (or others) can edit the original post. So when someone actually reads the original post, s-he doesn't have to read the 20 mails of clearing things up to have a clear idea of what's the proposal. This is a minus one for mailing lists in my opinion. Le ven. 1 févr. 2019 à 19:39, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> a écrit :
A doublon ! Because I'm not answering to anyone Some don't like forums and will leave python-ideas if we switch to forums. And I completely understand why, I'm in the same case for other mailing lists. Some suggested Google Groups. This kind of tool is really interesting since we can configure it to send mails for each message. So people wanting mails have their mails and can answer and people wanting a forum still have it. But it has several drawbacks, including it's Google so for an open source project it's not ideal. I think something that hasn't been cited is the poor readability of code posted by mails. It's juste aweful to me. You may have a trick for good formating but I think that's a good point for other systems, or at least complementary systems to mails. Le ven. 1 févr. 2019 à 23:20, Adrien Ricocotam <ricocotam@gmail.com> a écrit :
On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 9:21 AM Adrien Ricocotam <ricocotam@gmail.com> wrote:
On a forum (no matter the form), you can edit the original post. Thus, when something was unclear, false or needed an edit, the author (or others) can edit the original post. So when someone actually reads the original post, s-he doesn't have to read the 20 mails of clearing things up to have a clear idea of what's the proposal. This is a minus one for mailing lists in my opinion.
And then people wonder whether quoted text really aligns with the original post, whether "sort by post date/time" actually means what it says, and whether people have actually changed their stance while editing a post. No thank you. In accounting, git repositories, and mailing lists, you cannot edit the past - you can only post a follow-up. ChrisA
[Chris Angelico]
It's common etiquette to clearly label your edits. That's why you'll see people write "EDIT: I changed X, Y, and Z due to <this comment>". Reddit can show how long ago a given post was edited (if it was at all) and commenters can flag posts that were edited in a misleading way. There's also no inherent reason a forum couldn't keep and expose the full history of edits to each post. It would be interesting if you could link to a specific edit so when some one says "I don't understand X and you weren't clear about Z" you could edit your post to clarify and link to the edit in a response saying "I edited <http://www.google.com> my post to clarify. Thanks!" On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 4:29 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 9:52 AM Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com> wrote:
Requires cooperation and discipline. You have no proof that someone didn't unintentionally (or even maliciously) change the content of the post to misrepresent someone.
Reddit can show how long ago a given post was edited (if it was at all) and commenters can flag posts that were edited in a misleading way. There's also no inherent reason a forum couldn't keep and expose the full history of edits to each post.
Sure, it's possible to keep them all. It's not easy to adequately *show* them unless someone specifically says "show me the history".
It would be interesting if you could link to a specific edit so when some one says "I don't understand X and you weren't clear about Z" you could edit your post to clarify and link to the edit in a response saying "I edited my post to clarify. Thanks!"
I've seen that. It tends to result in posts that say "I've edited my preceding post", which is just as spammy as a followup but still disrupts the conversation. Still can't see it as an advantage. Edits like that are great for something that's meant to be a lasting document. That's why a PEP can be edited, and it retains its full history. You can go back and look at everything. But the mailing list is a discussion forum, not a document showing the final state of a discussion. ChrisA
[Chris Angelico]
Any form of civil communication requires cooperation and discipline. [Chris Angelico]
A) As I said in the post you're quoting, it's not necessarily true that you have no proof. B) I don't know of any forum system that allows you to misrepresent some one else. Editing your own post maliciously can only be used to misrepresent what you said. Even then, if your edit history is available, any attempt to do so can be called out. [Chris Angelico]
That's a matter of interface design. It may be just as easy as un-collapsing responses. Hopefully, if the community isn't full of liars and jerks, I don't see why the edit history would need to be super easy to explore. [Chris Angelico]
Just saying "I've edited my preceding post" is not the same as being able to link to the edit so that the person can clearly see exactly how you addressed their question. [Chris Angelico]
Still can't see it as an advantage.
The advantage is that other people don't have to dig down into a conversation to get all the clarifications and explanations that would otherwise be missing in your original post. [Chris Angelico]
I don't see how it would hurt discussion to have both. You can keep the: "X doesn't make any sense and I don't get Y" comment *and* the response referencing where those points are addressed *and* the make the fully edited version of the OP visible *and* allow anyone to review the edit history. None of those things are mutually exclusive. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 5:02 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 05:36:09PM -0600, Abe Dillon wrote:
B) I don't know of any forum system that allows you to misrepresent some one else.
Core developer Brett Cannon has taken up editing other people's comments on github if he doesn't approve of their tone. I'm now proactively editing people's comments on issues so they are less aggressive, e.g. "You need" becomes "it would be great if", etc. https://twitter.com/brettsky/status/1006660998860640256 And later: If they don't like it then I will simply ban them. Take note of how many people responding to Brett think it is a wonderful idea. The ability to edit other people's posts is considered a feature, not a bug. Github (currently) provides the full history of edits to each post. Reddit just has a flag that shows you whether a post was edited or not. Isn't technology wonderful? -- Steven
On Sat, 2 Feb 2019 21:20:40 +1100 Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Those people are probably a small cultural bubble, though. Twitter and other social networks act like echo chambers, not as promoters of rational debate. I've found Brett's stance on this unacceptable and I think I've already said it. Regards Antoine.
* I didn't have time to read the whole convo' yet * I think linking to a tutorial on "how to use a mailing list" that shows some examples on popular email client like Gmail on android or Mail in iOS would be something really helpful to beginners. When they subscribe, a bot would send that link alongside a nice welcoming message.
This list IS hard for newcomers. I wish there was one place where I could read up on how to not feel like a noob.
On Sat, Feb 02, 2019 at 11:12:02AM -0500, James Lu wrote:
This list IS hard for newcomers. I wish there was one place where I could read up on how to not feel like a noob.
It has become unfashionable to link to this, because it is allegedly too elitest and unfriendly and not welcoming enough, but I still think it is extremely valuable: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html (Its also somewhat unpopular because the maintainer has become something of a politically Right-wing extremist.) If you think of *proposals* as a kind of question: "What are the Pros and Cons of this suggestion?" rather than "We must do this. I have spoken, make it so!" then the Smart Questions document is relevant. Do your research first. What have you tried? Have you tried to knock holes in your own proposal or are you so excited by the Pros that you are blind to the Cons? What do other languages do? Do they differ from Python in ways which matter to your proposal? Did you make even a feeble attempt to search the archives, Stackoverflow, etc, or just post the first ill-formed thought that came to your mind? If your proposal been asked before, unless you are bringing something new to the discussion, don't waste everyone's time covering old ground. -- Steven
On 2/3/2019 12:44 PM, James Lu wrote:
On Feb 2, 2019, at 7:17 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
That’s some great stuff, can we document it somewhere? I think it would benefit future proposers.
*This list* is documented at https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas. I think a short paragraph starting "Before you post a proposal, ...", based on what Steven posted above, would be a good idea, and as useful as 'respect the COC'. Please give it a go and post a proposed addition here. Once polished, a proposal for that page would go to the list owners if they don't notice it. python-ideas-owner at python.org -- Terry Jan Reedy
Agreed, thanks James for asking. And thanks for bringing up the issue of communication mode in different mediums, Robert. I personally think the type of discussions taking place on this list would be better suited to a more interactive or conversational medium. Is there already, or would anyone be opposed to the creation of a #python-ideas on a large IRC network? I'd hope discussions there can have the same weight, merit, community involvement, and potential for PEP-tracking ideas. I think accommodating different people's best communication modes is essential to the continued development of any community and project. -------- Original Message -------- On Feb 1, 2019, 10:21, Robert Vanden Eynde wrote:
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 05:43:54PM +0000, Alex Shafer via Python-ideas wrote:
That biases the community against people who aren't available to chat at the same time as the majority. E,g, people in different time zones, or who work or have other committments during which time they can't take part in the discussion. The beauty of email is that it sits in your inbox until you get a chance to respond, even if that is a few days later. In IRC, you might have a window of opportunity of a few hours. In a busy chat room, it might be a few seconds before the comment you are replying to disappears off screen into irrelevance. IRC encourages one sentence replies. There really isn't room for complex reasoning or long debates. It is good for simple answers and knee-jerk responses. -- Steve
I've pitched this before but gotten little feedback (especially positive feedback), but I think a Reddit-style forum would be a pretty vast improvement. We could easily start a python_ideas subreddit to try it out. I know the google group presents threaded conversations, but I've run into enough bugs trying to use that platform that I now only interact with python-ideas via my gmail account, and threads are flattened here. Also, a Reddit-style forum has voting built in. As a bonus, we can write moderation bots and present useful info in the side-bar. If people find Reddit distasteful or otherwise a bad idea, maybe we can find some forum software that replicates the feature set of Reddit and host it ourselves? On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 10:41 AM James Lu <jamtlu@gmail.com> wrote:
If any non-email system is adopted, it will exclude me, and probably many other contributors to this list. A mailing list is an appropriate and useful format. "Discussion systems" are not. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 1:36 PM Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com> wrote:
-- Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
On 01Feb2019 12:35, Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com> wrote:
Bear in mind that many participants here are against forums, myself included. A mailing list comes to me, its user interface is as _I_ want it rather than a single web based interface, and it isn't a web page. My laptop collects my email constantly in the background; I can read and reply to email while offline because the messages are local and my laptop has a working mail system which queues. Email comes to me; a forum must be visited.
The flatness of threads is a mail reader artifact. I'm no fan of the GMail web interface on a personal basis. I use mutt, and have it configured to fold up read threads and unfold threads with unread content. The point here is that with email there are many many clients and one should find one which suits your preferred interface and behaviour. With a web interface this is basicly not a choice. And IMO web browsers are terrible email readers. Some systems like discourse offer a web interface and also email. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 12:35:15PM -0600, Abe Dillon wrote:
I don't think you need anyone's permission to do so. Provided you don't try to pass it off as in any way official or blessed by the PSF (not to be confused with the Python Secret Underground which most emphatically does not exist) you might as well try it and see what happens. But some reasons why I am luke-warm on the idea: - I can have as many email identities as I like; I can only have one Reddit identity at a time. If I want to keep my Reddit persona seperate from my Python persona, I need to create multiple accounts (possibly violating the terms of service?) and remember to log out of one and into the other. - Too difficult (impossible?) to keep local human-readable copies of either the discussion thread, or even your own posts. - I have to explicitly go to the site to see what is happening, rather than have the posts automatically arrive in my inbox. - Ads. - Reddit's new web UI. (How long before the "old.reddit..." URLs stop working?) -- Steven
Note: none of the following is an endorsement of the r/python_ideas idea. I'm just responding point-by-point to what you wrote. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 10:47 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
- I can have as many email identities as I like; I can only have one Reddit identity at a time.
Do you mean because your browser doesn't support per-window or per-tab cookie jars? I'm pretty sure there are browsers that do. (I use multiple instances of the same browser with different home directories to solve this general problem, but I think there are other solutions.) Also, many clients (including RES in a browser) support switching accounts by choosing from a drop-down list.
It isn't a violation of the TOS and it's extremely common and people are open about it. It is a TOS violation to, for instance, up/downvote the same post/comment with two of your accounts.
- Too difficult (impossible?) to keep local human-readable copies of either the discussion thread, or even your own posts.
I agree the Reddit client situation is pretty sad compared to the email client situation, but non-browser clients do exist. You don't have to use Reddit in a browser. RES lets you save things locally, but you are still stuck viewing them in a browser.
- I have to explicitly go to the site to see what is happening, rather than have the posts automatically arrive in my inbox.
Well, you can get an RSS feed of any subreddit or comment thread and stick that in your email client. It's not perfect I agree.
From another of your messages:
Reddit doesn't allow anyone but the original user to edit posts or comments. Moderators (ordinary users who are selected per subreddit like IRC ops) can only remove the entire text of a comment (or text post) and put "[removed]" in its place. They can also make posts no longer appear on the subreddit, but they continue to be viewable if you have the direct url. There was a scandal in which a Reddit co-founder admitted to editing someone's comment. I think he was able to do that because he had direct database access. If someone has direct database access then of course a full edit history won't help since you can bypass that along with everything else. I am definitely a fan of the distributed nature of email. However, a rogue admin of python.org or their registrar or ISP or some Internet switch could alter emails to this list without leaving any edit history. Proper authentication could solve a lot of that, but as long as we're dreaming, it's only fair to make Reddit distributed and not-for-profit too.
James Lu schrieb am 01.02.19 um 17:40:
A lot of the traffic on this email list is people saying “I don’t understand” or “that’s not what I meant” or trying to re-explain. A lot of “-1”s are really “I don’t see the usefulness of this”.
So I want an open discussion on: How can we communicate clearer?
While I agree with others that this is a good question worth asking, I also think that it's somewhat the nature of this list that a) the topics discussed here often require a good understanding of Python and the workings of the language, b) the described use cases and ideas are often novel and therefore may not immediately ring bells in everyone's ears, and c) many topics are recurring, so people who give a quick "-1" may just be reluctant to discuss them all over again without expecting new facets to appear (which rarely happens, in fact, although there are famously PEP-ed exceptions). And, last but not least, "I don't see the usefulness of this" is a perfectly valid counter-argument, especially for a well designed language like Python. I can think of at least one programming language that was not so lucky to have enough people say this. Stefan
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 11:40:37AM -0500, James Lu wrote:
So I want an open discussion on: How can we communicate clearer?
Remember the Curse of Knowledge: just because you know something, don't imagine that all your readers know it too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-curse-of-knowledge-pinker-... https://sites.williams.edu/nk2/files/2011/08/Curse_of_Knowledge.pdf Try putting yourself in the reader's position. Will they understand what you are talking about? Re-read (and edit) your email for clarity before you hit send. Read your own email when it arrives in your inbox. If there are any major mistakes or confusing bits, reply to the list and clarify. With luck, maybe people will read your clarification before they respond. Try not to make rapid-fire knee-jerk responses to other people. (I know that's one bit of advice I personally find hard to follow.) Try to write clear and precise language. https://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/style_purpose_strategy/writi... But note that *clear* and *precise* are often opposed to each other. The page above gives an example: The biota exhibited a one hundred percent mortality response. All the fish died. but the two sentences don't mean the same thing. (In the first, *everything* died; in the second, only the fish died.) Jargon is a double-edged sword for this reason: not everyone will know what the jargon means, but for those that do, jargon terms are both concise and precise in ways that plain English terms usually are not. As programmers, we use a lot of jargon, but remember than not everyone has the same background. My obvious technical term may be your obfuscatory gibberish. If you expect that a jargon term will be unfamiliar, either explain what you mean, or give a link to a site that explains it. If you're not sure whether a jargon term will be unfamiliar to others, remember the Curse of Knowledge: it probably will be. Remember that *most ideas are bad* -- that is equally true here as on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Most_ideas_are_bad Be critical about your own ideas before you post. Try to anticipate objections. Either you will decide the objections are right, or you may be able to pre-empt them. Have a bit of humility: just because others disagree with you, doesn't mean that they haven't understood you. Perhaps they have understood your idea and its consequences better than you have yourself. It is *really hard* to read criticism of your ideas, but necessary. If the criticism was valid, then either your idea needs to fixed to avoid the problems given, or it needs to be abandoned as unfixable. Remember too that sometimes there is no right or wrong answer, just a matter of taste, or of value judgements. This especially applies when there are trade-offs involved. As a language, Python makes many trade-offs (as do all other languages). Some ideas are not bad in and of themselves, but they go against those trade-offs and consequently aren't a good fit for Python. On the flip side, sometimes we're too quick to reject ideas because they've never been done before. For some definition of "never". (Usually "never that I know of, not that I've looked too closely, or at all".) In my experience, Python programmers tend to be very conservative, perhaps more so than in other communities. Like cats, we often dislike things merely because they are new and different. Consequently sometimes its just a matter of patience and timing. Python as a language rarely is a trend-setter. Let other languages take the risks, we'll steal the ideas that work and leave those that don't. This conservativeness is only getting worse, as more of the core devs decide that we ought to slow the pace of change down even more, perhaps even halt it completely. I don't know what can be done about that. (Biologists have a word for complex systems which are stable: "dead".) -- Steven
Thanks Steve, that’s a good point, I might have been in one of the bad things you describe. It’s kinda funny that Python is conservative while being heavily used in the most recent techonologies (referring to machine learning). I personally think it’s not good but I might be too young for being conservative. Just a point about writing clear and precise English. For a good part of the audience and the writers, English is not our native language. Even if I’m considered good in English according to the standards in France, will far from being bilingual and expressing myself in English is not that easy. Technical discussions are not easy, no matter the language. Using a different language is harder and makes it really difficult some times. That’s why, in my case, I felt I mis expressed myself and proposed explanations on the answers I gave : I thought that was not clear because I’m not English-speaker. Another point, if when answering you (and others including me) you understood farther than the author, juste say what you understood further and all the implications. It will benefit everyone and discard ambiguities (especially for new-comers). On Sat 2 Feb 2019 at 13:45, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Sat, 2 Feb 2019 at 13:55, Adrien Ricocotam <ricocotam@gmail.com> wrote:
Just a point about writing clear and precise English. For a good part of the audience and the writers, English is not our native language. Even if I’m considered good in English according to the standards in France, will far from being bilingual and expressing myself in English is not that easy. Technical discussions are not easy, no matter the language. Using a different language is harder and makes it really difficult some times. That’s why, in my case, I felt I mis expressed myself and proposed explanations on the answers I gave : I thought that was not clear because I’m not English-speaker.
One point I will make - for myself (and maybe for the other native English speakers here) I find it really hard to determine when someone here is not a native speaker, basically because in general their English is so good that it's hard to tell! (I certainly couldn't communicate in any way effectively in French, which is the only language I could even claim to have a basic grasp of outside of English). So I'm sure some misunderstandings come from simply assuming people meant what they said, when in fact they were trying to say something slightly different, but didn't realise the nuances. It's hard to know what to do about this. As an English speaker I try to remember that not everyone is a native speaker, but being able to communicate effectively in another language *at all* is sufficiently foreign to my experience that I can't really understand the implications of being in that position. And expecting non-native speakers to continually remind us that they are speaking in a language other than their native one is unreasonable - not least because they are communicating better than many native speakers (in my experience). I guess the best answer is the usual one - assume good faith on everyone's part, and forgive minor inaccuracies. Also, while pedantic precision is common in technical discussions (and speaking for myself, something I often overindulge in for the fun of it...) it's better avoided in discussions on the list, where the fine distinctions involved may be lost on other participants. Paul
On Sat, 2 Feb 2019 at 06:12, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
Agreed 100%. There's also a cultural difference between, even, the UK and the US, whereby I'll mean certain things one way and have others interpret it differently. For example, the expression to "table" something, means the opposite across the pond. When my American colleagues say things like "let's table that", I always have to pinch myself to realise that means "put it off" and not "talk about it right now". And I **am** a native English speaker, despite what my name would lead some to believe. The above written, I have found that the python community, insofar as I've interacted with it, is more understanding and tolerant of these communication nuances when compared to other communities. -- H One point I will make - for myself (and maybe for the other native
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The community is really opened on the subject and I didn't receive any bad feelings about my English writing. I just wanted to remember everyone that a lot of us are non-native and despite the fact we speak well, we might not actually transmit exactly what we thought, nor understand what was meant. It's already not always the case when speaking native language. Actually my paragraph was more a point to introduce the following one : detailing what we said doesn't necessary mean we think the other is dumb. A lot of my sentence formulations are inspires by french and might mislead the understanding. A french would probably get what I mean, non-french will probably not. But we're focusing on something that's not the central subject here (even though it's pretty important). Le sam. 2 févr. 2019 à 15:30, Hasan Diwan <hasan.diwan@gmail.com> a écrit :
That's a nice question ! The main thing is "is this list more EmailLike or MessengerLike" When I speak on Messenger (or any instantaneous conversation software) I send a lot of very small messages, like "+1", it's interactive, I'm expecting a short answer. If I say something stupid, I undo, if I can't undo because the delay of my client is done, I send another message beginning with "Oops" or something obvious. It's the EAFP (Easier to ask for forgiveness than Permission) style. The point is "looking ar my first few words, people understand the message" When I speak on TraditionalDifferedEmail, I'm more like LBYL (Look before you Leap), I write a long, but structured message, such that people see first the structure, (intro, body, conclusion), and look in the message if they want. On Fri, 1 Feb 2019, 17:40 James Lu <jamtlu@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 06:21:07PM +0100, Robert Vanden Eynde wrote:
That's a nice question !
The main thing is "is this list more EmailLike or MessengerLike"
This is a perfect example of the problem that James is referring to. I honestly cannot tell if you are being rhetorical, or if you are so technically naive that you genuinely don't know that this is an email mailing list rather than instant messenger or IRC or some other form of instantaneous chat. [...]
That doesn't sound like the sorts of messages you have been sending here recently. https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-January/055022.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-January/055028.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-January/055032.html I don't mean this as a criticism of such short posts. Sometimes all that needs to be said is a single sentence. But when you describe your posting style one way, but actually post another way, that is precisely the sort of confusing lack of clarity that this thread is about. -- Steve
Both :p Newcomers that never spoke on a forum are sometimes lost, they don't see the structure. Therefore I'm helping those newcomers, and the old timer will be like "yeah, he technically defines terms that are obvious for me". When I was a newcomer on this list, I was lost, people said things like "don't up post" or "don't put the answer below" or "answer inline" in a jargon I didn't know about. I'm CS teacher, and I see everyday that things not said explicitly create misunderstanding to newcomers.
Yep, depending on the thread, I'm either type EAFP or LBYL, and I think people can easily guess which type :) (long message = LBYL). However, I don't always "read myself two times" before I send (because of my EAFP nature) so my last mail for example was LBYL but has some spelling mistakes. -- And I guess people will ask if they are not sure. I don't mean this as a criticism of such short posts. Sometimes all that
needs to be said is a single sentence.
Agreed !! But when you describe your
posting style one way, but actually post another way, that is precisely the sort of confusing lack of clarity that this thread is about.
Indeed, mixing standards is bad, but on the other hand, people can think "Robert is Eafp", "Robert is more LBYL when writing long messages")
I'm kinda new to those mailing lists and those are the only ones I ever subscribed so I'm a bit in the audience you're targeting James. What I think is bad using mailing list it's the absence of votes. I'd often like to just hit a "+1" button for some mails just to say to the author I'm with him and I think s.he's ideas are great. In some of the recent threads, some of the ideas I agreed with were just smashed by others. I couldn't give my two cents and the debate juste ended and I couldn't say the author I was behind him.er. Another thing I think is not good is the absence of little chit-chat and editing. Actually, a lot of emails are just explanations of what the authors meant. That's pretty spammy and a few messages exchanged + editing would correct this spammy thing. In another hand, I think mailing lists are great to avoid short and useless messages. There's no spammy message like "I'm ok" which could be replaced by just a "+1" button. It forces us using LBYL principle (@poke Robert) and it (imho) better fills the needs of such discussions. As you may have get it, I'd rather a forum like thing rather than mailing lists but mailings lists are great. Le ven. 1 févr. 2019 à 18:22, Robert Vanden Eynde <robertve92@gmail.com> a écrit :
On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 12:43 PM Adrien Ricocotam <ricocotam@gmail.com> wrote:
I feel like the strongest virtue of mailing lists is the absence of votes. Various chat systems where you can add a "thumbs up" or "smile" or the like encourage laziness and content-free interaction. On a mailing list, for the most part, we encourage people to formulate complete opinions supported by reasons and arguments. That is what python-ideas should be. It should not be a democracy or a voting system. That said, obviously sometimes people do just reply with +1 to something. I do that myself at times. There are times when that really is an appropriate reply, but I think it should be discouraged as the default answer style. Yours, David... -- Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
+1 votes hardly add anything to a technical discussion, and in the contrary, can and do easily lead to a dysfunctional decision style. If you agree with someone else's idea, you probably have some rational arguments behind it, some hard evidence that has not yet been discussed and that could change the course of the discussions. If you can't come up with even a single reason why you like a proposal, probably you didn't think too much about, and so, your +1 would be an uninformed vote. And last, this list is not a decision instance for python, it is just a place where people can share ideas about it, but the final decisions are not meant to be taken here. Em sex, 1 de fev de 2019 às 15:49, David Mertz <mertz@gnosis.cx> escreveu:
-- Marcos Eliziário Santos mobile/whatsapp/telegram: +55(21) 9-8027-0156 skype: marcos.eliziario@gmail.com linked-in : https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliziario/
+1 votes hardly add anything to a technical discussion, and in the contrary, can and do easily lead to a dysfunctional decision style. If you agree with someone else's idea, you probably have some rational arguments behind it, some hard evidence that has not yet been discussed and that could change the course of the discussions. If you can't come up with even a single reason why you like a proposal, probably you didn't think too much about, and so, your +1 would be an uninformed vote. And last, this list is not a decision instance for python, it is just a place where people can share ideas about it, but the final decisions are not meant to be taken here. Em sex, 1 de fev de 2019 às 16:02, Marcos Eliziario < marcos.eliziario@gmail.com> escreveu:
-- Marcos Eliziário Santos mobile/whatsapp/telegram: +55(21) 9-8027-0156 skype: marcos.eliziario@gmail.com linked-in : https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliziario/
Email Can be fast, as long as it is structured. The list only impose the structure of "Thread" ie. Two mails are in the same thread if they have the same subject. Each thread can have it's own format. Email use the quoting mechanism using leading ">" ane generally people do not like html (switch to TextOnly in your mail client if it helps you). Therefore inline images are not used often (one prefer). In the end, anyone can see the list of email, by date, or by thread, on https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-February/thread.html On Fri, 1 Feb 2019, 18:42 Adrien Ricocotam <ricocotam@gmail.com wrote: couldn't say the author I was behind him.er.
Did you use inclusive writing ? :D do you speak French ? :D Generally I suggest using the middle dot, "·" easily accessible by copy paste, or by long pressing the "-" key on android.
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 06:42:33PM +0100, Adrien Ricocotam wrote:
I'm kinda new to those mailing lists and those are the only ones I ever subscribed so I'm a bit in the audience you're targeting James.
Hi Adrien, I see that you first posted in November and haven't posted since.
That sounds pretty spammy to me. The last thing I want to see is something (either technology or culture) encouraging people to flood the list with a bunch of content-free "+1" or "metoo!" messages. The occasional "I agree but have nothing else to say" message is okay, but I wouldn't want to see fifty a day. This isn't Facebook or Reddit, where +1 Likes cause messages to move to the top of your feed. (And thank goodness for that.) This is a technical mailing list where the worth of a proposals usually depends on merit, not the number of votes.
I see that the Reply button on your email client does work, so you clearly *can* give your two cents worth (which is exactly what you are doing now). And the nature of email is that you can reply to any message in your inbox, no matter how old. You can reply to a ten year old message provided you still have it available in a mail folder, resurrecting the thread. Whether it is polite to resurrect such long-dead threads, or whether anyone else will respond, are separate questions. I realise that sometimes people are busy and cannot reply immediately to a discussion. There have been times that I have not been able to respond to a thread until long after it has faded away naturally, and I have *chosen* to not respond because I decided that the discussion had been settled and I didn't care enough to restart the discussion. (Sometimes a discussion settles to "nobody can decide so the status quo wins". See Nick Coghlan's blog.) But within reason, if you have something well thought out and/or important to say, you can and should just reply to a post and say it.
Another thing I think is not good is the absence of little chit-chat
This mailing list is often too busy as it is, without encouraging chit-chat. "Hi Bob, how are the wife and kids? I've been pretty good myself, thanks for asking, but my old injury has been aching a bit. Did I ever tell you the story about that, its quite funny. What do you think of Trump's latest shocking comment? Did you see that hilarious video about a cat? Did you learn the latest trick that doctors don't want you to know? Oh, I nearly forgot, your proposal for adding GOTO to Python and removing for-loops is an awesome idea, +1."
I'm confused. First you complain that "a lot of emails are just explanations of what the authors meant". That's a *good* thing, surely. This is a technical discussion list, and if a message is unclear, then explaning what you meant should make it more clear. And then you say "a few messages exchanged ... would correct this" but what do you think those messages exchanged would be if not explanations of what the authors meant?
Which does what? Send a +1 email to a thousand people? That's pretty spammy.
Mailing lists and web forums each have their advantages and disadvantages, but in general, I find web forums far noisier and of less value. In the future this list may be migrated to Mailman 3 which includes a more modern web-forum-like interface as well as email. http://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/userguide.html As I understand it, there have already been a few low-volume Python mailing lists migrated to Mailman 3, and if they end up being successful eventually the rest will follow. -- Steve
[Steven D'Aprano]
Since I just (almost simultaneously with this post) suggested giving Reddit a try, I feel obligated to defend it a little bit. 1) You might be right. It might result in lower quality discussions, but it seems like a very low barrier to entry to at least try and see. 2) You can control, to some degree, what gets to the top of your feed. In an email list, it's based on who posted last which seems hardly an improvement. 3) There are well moderated and/or cultivated subs like www.reddit.com/r/science where the votes end up being a good approximation to merit. [Steven D'Aprano]
In the future this list may be migrated to Mailman 3 which includes a more modern web-forum-like interface as well as email.
http://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/userguide.html Can you summarize what mailman3 brings to the table? The docs aren't very clear and have a lot of preamble. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 12:39 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On 2/1/19 1:01 PM, Abe Dillon wrote:
[...]
A mailing list is not a feed. Whoever posted last ends up at the bottom of the thread, so that I can read threads from top to bottom in chronological order. Getting the last word in shouldn't earn a spot at the top of the list. In my email client, I do, in fact, have complete control over what gets to the [logical] "top of the list"; in a web-based forum, I have only what the forum allows.
Because the moderators understand the merit(s) of who is behind every +1 vote, or because only approved voters are allowed to vote? Dan, a decades and decades long fan of mailing lists and real email clients
[Dan Sommers]
A mailing list is not a feed... Dan, a decades and decades long fan of mailing lists and real email clients.
I'm only familiar with Gmail which keeps reply chains coherent and moves each chain to the top of my "forums" tab based on who responded last. I haven't explored the various email clients available, can you suggest one? [Dan Sommers]
That doesn't like any closer an approximation to a merit-based solution to me. [Dan Sommers]
Part of it has to do with the subject matter. the python subreddit <https://www.reddit.com/r/python> also has, I would say, higher quality than average discussion just like the PBS Space Time YouTube channel <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSKzgpt4HBU> is one of the few places on YouTube where the comments don't generally make you abandon hope for the future of humanity. A lot of it has to do with rules put in place and enforced by the moderators. They cultivate a higher quality community by promoting a higher standard of interaction. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 1:34 PM Dan Sommers < 2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE@potatochowder.com> wrote:
On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 7:59 AM Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com> wrote:
Maybe not, but it's consistent. You can easily scan through a thread in the order it was posted. Anything that allows things to be upvoted above other things specifically encourages you to read only the most-upvoted answers. That works for Stack Overflow, since individual answers are meant to be coherent and self-contained, and have their own comments threads; it does not work for extended discussions (which is why SO specifically discourages extended discussions in comments). Got any ideas for a "merit-based" ordering? Or: got any definition of "merit" that would actually be useful to this style of discussion? ChrisA
[Chris Angelico]
Maybe not, but it's consistent. You can easily scan through a thread in the order it was posted.
That's true in the case of a subreddit conversation too. I wouldn't suggest a system that doesn't let you see the whole conversation. You can order comments by post-time if you think that's relevant for whatever reason. [Chris Angelico]
Anything presented in a list format specifically encourages you to read only the things at the top of the list. I haven't read discussions from 2012 because they're way down the list and I only joined python-ideas recently. A voting system is simply an attempt to make sure the stuff at the top of the list is more relevant than the stuff at the bottom. [Chris Angelico]
it does not work for extended discussions (which is why SO specifically discourages extended discussions in comments).
Why not? I've seen it work many times for extended discussions just fine. [Chris Angelico]
Got any ideas for a "merit-based" ordering?
Yes, a voting system. [Chris Angelico]
Or: got any definition of "merit" that would actually be useful to this style of discussion?
No. Merit is very hard to define, but again, there are subreddits with well curated discussions and in those subreddits, the voting system seems to be a decent approximation for merit. Even in less well-curated subreddits, the voting system seems to be a decent approximation to merit. I mean, the platform exists. We don't have to rely solely on theory in hypothetical land. It's kind-of like discussing whether an encyclopedia based on user-generated content could ever be useful. It's not even hard to make a subreddit. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 3:06 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On 2/1/19 2:58 PM, Abe Dillon wrote:
I used mutt for a long time, and then claws-mail, and now thunderbird. They all met my needs, although I did give up on claws-mail when I got a hidpi display (claws-mail based on gtk2, which doesn't grok hidpi displays). Another point in favor of email clients over web pages is that there are many of them, and *you* control the display and other preferences rather than whoever wrote the forum or owns the server. then to display higher scoring messages "above" the others, or not display certain messages at all. Personally, I don't use the automated systems, but they're very comprehensive (arguably too complicated), and again, *user* adjustable. In an optimal technical discussion, opinions from users don't count for anything. The ideas stand on their own merits and research and metrics; users only serve to confirm the methodology. Dan
[Dan Sommers]
There is a tool called the Reddit Enhancement Suite or RES (and probably others) That lets you control a great deal of the display and other preferences, however; I'm not sure how that control compares to something like Thunderbird. One thing that's nice about Reddit is you can link to posts, so if you've already discussed something at length in another thread, you can simply refer to that discussion. [Dan Sommers]
A lot can be said about how an ideal world would work. Ideally, we could define the meaning of life and good and evil and we wouldn't need this clumsy system of laws and courts to approximate the whole mess. I don't think it's that crazy to think that a voting system might approximate merit a little better than the timestamp on a post. It's not going to be perfect, but perfect shouldn't be the enemy of better. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 3:17 PM Dan Sommers < 2QdxY4RzWzUUiLuE@potatochowder.com> wrote:
I have absolutely no interest in any system that arranges comments in anything but related thread and chronological order. I DO NOT want any rating or evaluation of comments of any kind other than my own evaluation based on reading them. Well, also in reading the informed opinions of other readers. I would find it useless if not actively counterproductive to follow any system where such ratings of comments existed. There is one property that every system invented to supercede email have in common. They are all dramatically worse in almost every way. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 5:09 PM Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com wrote:
Simple tools, free-format are always more conductive to the free exchange of ideas. Let's not forget that a huge chunk of our current science and math was built with scientists collaborating over physical mail delivered by sailboats across the channel, train and even horse carriages. Em sex, 1 de fev de 2019 às 22:20, David Mertz <mertz@gnosis.cx> escreveu:
-- Marcos Eliziário Santos mobile/whatsapp/telegram: +55(21) 9-8027-0156 skype: marcos.eliziario@gmail.com linked-in : https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliziario/
To be clear. Most of what I don't want is a system where OTHER people are relying on ratings rather than careful reading. I want to communicate on changes where posts cannot be "voted up" or edited, etc. Mind you, I do know this other than this sort of discussion had other needs. GitHub issues are very useful. Occasionally I'll even go back and edit a prior comment rather than add another. But there I'm trying to make the issue genuinely correctly describe the issue at hand. Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange are very useful for finding technical answers. Voting up best response there is extremely useful. I do not want python-ideas to resemble those. It is simply not the appropriate kind of discussion. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019, 7:30 PM Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com wrote:
[David Mertz]
To be clear. Most of what I don't want is a system where OTHER people are relying on ratings rather than careful reading.
In my experience, there's nothing you can do to make other people read anything carefully. Plus, many of the counterpoints have been "I have a lot more freedom in filtering and organizing emails with my email client", so I fear your dreams of forcing everybody to read everything will never be realized. As I've pointed out before, putting things in chronological order doesn't force people to read anything, it just favors new over old. I haven't read any of the discussions before 2016 (save a few). [David Mertz]
The ability to edit in discussions is useful for the exact same reason. I have to say. I've frequented Reddit for years and never had to deal with a disingenuous edit. I think that fear is a bit overblown. [David Mertz]
I find it very useful for discussion. I don't know why people keep declaring it's no good for discussion without explaining why. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 6:37 PM David Mertz <mertz@gnosis.cx> wrote:
Typical technical discussion in threaded discussion foruns --First Post -- First Level -- First level with an interesting idea (let's do B?) -- 2nd level discussing some potential issues with B -- 2nd level workaround for said issues, namely, making sure D -- 2nd level more discussion -- 2nd level add nausean -- 3rd replied by mistake last poster, not parent thread -- 3rd some are answering here now -- 2nd another guy answering ad nausean here -- 2nd unrelated thoughts -- 2nd discussion continues on the parent level, but some answers are buried on the level below "ad nausean -- a consensus is found! -- Yeah, let's do B, but taking care of D -- bla bla bla .... .... -- Hey, what if we did B? -- all over again......... Em sex, 1 de fev de 2019 às 22:30, Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com> escreveu:
-- Marcos Eliziário Santos mobile/whatsapp/telegram: +55(21) 9-8027-0156 skype: marcos.eliziario@gmail.com linked-in : https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliziario/
[Marcos Eliziario]
Is this intended to make forums look better or worse than the typical Python-ideas thread. My experience has been: -- First Post -- Counterpoint A -- I'm -1 on this -- Counterpoint A -- Counterpoint A -- Counterpoint B -- Counterpoint A -- I'm -1 on this -- Counterpoint A ... On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 6:38 PM Marcos Eliziario <marcos.eliziario@gmail.com> wrote:
It’s very demotivating to hear just negative feedback on this list. Was starting this thread useful for y’all?
On Sat, Feb 02, 2019 at 10:57:40AM -0500, James Lu wrote:
It’s very demotivating to hear just negative feedback on this list.
Was starting this thread useful for y’all?
Do you want an honest answer, or positive feedback? ("It was great!") Personally, no, it wasn't useful for me. It was a major time-sink to read a large number of emails mostly arguing about the pros and cons of email versus web forums, the value of Like buttons, and whether or not you can access Reddit outside of a browser. But when you get down to the fundamentals, none of these matter for effective communication. We can write lazy, confusing, knee-jerk posts on Reddit just as easily as via email. (If anything, the easier the medium for communication, the lazier, more confusing and more knee-jerk we will be.) As far as I can tell, I was the only person who actually tried to provide some concrete suggestions for communicating clearly. Although it is still only early days, maybe others will give their own suggestions over the next few days. (Come one guys, don't let me be the only one answering James' direct question.) Apologies if I missed other people's insights on clear communication. I did go back through the thread looking, but perhaps I didn't look closely enough. -- Steven
On Sun, Feb 3, 2019 at 7:07 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Sorry Steve, but I didn't answer his question because this whole thread has become nothing but noise, and I'm trying not to contribute any further to it. Which I'm doing here, by saying that no, it was not a useful thread. Mea culpa. ChrisA
Was starting this thread useful for y’all?
For now no, but it could. There's a tradeoff to have between the advantages of new social medias and their disadvantages. Since it's 50/50 or even 70 bad, 30 why not, we will probably keep mails. But some points have been said and were important. I especially think about the message <https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2019-February/055204.html> of Steve and some suggestions about welcoming new-comers with a message to help them a bit. Last thing that was important to me and non-english speakers was to say it was not always easy to understand, despite we speak well and that some behaviors might just be a mis-understanding rather than something else. Le dim. 3 févr. 2019 à 09:41, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> a écrit :
On Sat, 2 Feb 2019 at 23:38, James Lu <jamtlu@gmail.com> wrote:
It’s very demotivating to hear just negative feedback on this list.
Was starting this thread useful for y’all?
In the interests of clear communication, no it wasn't. In the interests of trying not to be *too* demotivating, the reason is that it was far too general a question, and it was almost entirely about how people behave, which is a sensitive topic, and not one that's well suited to the medium of email. So people ended up digressing and debating minor off-topic points, because it's bluntly too hard to come up with a polite, clear explanation, suitable for an email, of why certain people's writing styles are hard to work with (and even if someone did that, it's just stating the problem - proposing a solution is a whole order of magnitude more work). Very few people have the time or the inclination to put a lot of effort into carefully reasoned, well thought through emails. It's too much like writing an essay or a report. But that's what's needed when discussing a complex proposal. And "discussing complex proposals" is essentially the whole point of this list (as I see it). "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if we could do X" is *not* the intended use of the list, and it's precisely those partially (or even not at all) thought out postings that generate the most frustrating, least clear, conversations. Paul
I think we need to step away from the egalitarian ideal and have some way of knowing that Python committees are python committers. It’s really difficult to know how well your proposal is doing without having this.
On 2/2/2019 10:59 AM, James Lu wrote:
I think we need to ... have some way of knowing that Python committees are python committers. It’s really difficult to know how well your proposal is doing without having this.
That has occurred to me also. If two or three core developers respond negatively and none favorably, the proposal is likely dead, at least in its initial form. On bug.python.org issues, we are marked with the blue and yellow Python snakes. The sidebar has a link Committer List. If I click it when logged in, I see a list of 173 people (most inactive). This will not include Committers not registered on the tracker. Not logged in, I see the first batch of all 20000+ registered users, which seems like a bug. I don't know what you would see. There are perhaps 10 core developers who currently read the list with any regularity. On today's messages, besides myself, I recognize Stephen D'Aprano, Ronald Oussoren, Paul Moore, Antoine Pitrou, and Eric V. Smith. -- Terry Jan Reedy
On 2/1/19 4:07 PM, Abe Dillon wrote:
Mailman keeps an archive of all email sent to the python mailing list, and the individual messages have unique links. Usually, referring to a discussion by the subject of the email messages and some sort of date range is enough for someone to find the relevant discussions in the archive. I agree that it's not painless. After a while, I end up with my own "archive" in my email client (or in my email server), and I can reply to old messages as needed. This is also not painless.
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 01:01:06PM -0600, Abe Dillon wrote: [...]
In any serious, non-toy mail client you can sort your mail by any of Date, Size, Sender, Receiver, Thread or Subject line. More powerful mail clients should allow automatic filtering of messages into subfolders, hiding or muting threads, and displaying or hiding messages based on text searches. I've seen some that also allow you to add your own custom topics, like "Work", "Personal" etc. The bottom line is that email can be sorted, filtered, shuffled, sliced and diced in an almost infinite number of ways. If your email client isn't good enough, blame the tool, not the technology. [...]
The link was intended as a starting point for people to do their own research, not a finishing point. But the main things from my perspective are: - stable web URLs for archives; - better searching; - a web interface that allows posting as well as reading posts. My guess is that most people who aren't happy with email will care about the web interface, Hyperkitty. https://pypi.org/project/HyperKitty/ https://duffy.fedorapeople.org/presentations/libreplanet%202014/Hyperkitty2.... Demo: https://lists.stg.fedoraproject.org/archives/ -- Steve
[Steven D'Aprano]
There's no reason a forum system couldn't accommodate sorting, filtering, shuffling, slicing and dicing. It seems the only problem is the lack of tools. [Steven D'Aprano]
Thanks! I followed the link and was pretty lost by about half-way through the page. This clears things up! One thing I will say is that Reddit's search functionality has been pretty useless in my experience. It would be nice to have a useful search. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 4:27 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
[Chris Angelico]
With emails, you get your choice of tools. With web forum systems, you get the forum host's choice of tools.
There are many 3rd party tools for interacting with Reddit. It's all just data behind an API. There's no reason you couldn't have a choice of tools for a forum system. The biggest difference I see is that email APIs are more standardized. Maybe we should push for an open standard for forum-style communication. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 5:03 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
Email is based on open standards with multiple implementations, most of them open source, that you can run basically wherever you want. Reddit is a product from a company, with a privately controlled API, and that may not even be here tomorrow, and it is not based on open standards. What happens if Reddit goes bankrupt tomorrow? And let's not forget that mailing lists have a small barrier to entry. Moving this list to a forum would likely become an "eternal september" kind of event. Simple is good. Email is simple. Em sex, 1 de fev de 2019 às 21:17, Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com> escreveu:
-- Marcos Eliziário Santos mobile/whatsapp/telegram: +55(21) 9-8027-0156 skype: marcos.eliziario@gmail.com linked-in : https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliziario/
[Marcos Eliziario]
That's a good point. I suggested Reddit because it has a pretty extensive feature list and is fairly simple to set-up and try. Maybe we could make /r/python_thoughts instead of /r/python_ideas to denote the separation (i.e. nothing posted on /r/python_thoughts will be automatically shared on the python-ideas email list or vice-versa) or maybe there's some forum software based on open standards that has a similar feature set? Or maybe there are no open standards for internet forums, in which case, how would one go about advocating for such a thing? [Marcos Eliziario]
Simple is good. Email is simple.
Simple *can* be good, but it *can* also get in the way of fruitful conversation... On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 5:26 PM Marcos Eliziario <marcos.eliziario@gmail.com> wrote:
@Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info>'s big answer Hi, thanks for this complete answer. I might have been a bit confusing so i'll clear some details ;) I sent about 3 mails (may be 4) in this mailing list and the python dev's one. If I sent those emails it's because I felt legitimate to give my opinion, ie : I had enough knowledge to actually have an opinion and the arguments I had were (imo) relevent. In many subjects I actually have an opinion but not the knowledge to argument. That's what I was trying to express : mailing lists are kinda hard for newcomers.
I'm not suggesting to actually send emails. I was more refering to reddit's possibility of voting and we couldn't do it on mails. Ofc, don't send a mail to 1k people for a "+1", that's exactly what I'm saying : I'm not gonna send an email to say "I agree" full stop.
That's not what I was suggesting either but I get it's confusing. The votes I was talking about have no values of popularity it's just "agree", "disagree", "neutral" like we would find in "classical" forums (this <https://zestedesavoir.com/forums/sujet/544/mettons-en-musique-la-communaute/> is an example of what I'm talking about, french site).
But within reason, if you have something well thought out and/or important to say, you can and should just reply to a post and say it.
That's a point for mailing lists.
That's probably the most unclear point of my first mail ! On a forum (no matter the form), you can edit the original post. Thus, when something was unclear, false or needed an edit, the author (or others) can edit the original post. So when someone actually reads the original post, s-he doesn't have to read the 20 mails of clearing things up to have a clear idea of what's the proposal. This is a minus one for mailing lists in my opinion. Le ven. 1 févr. 2019 à 19:39, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> a écrit :
A doublon ! Because I'm not answering to anyone Some don't like forums and will leave python-ideas if we switch to forums. And I completely understand why, I'm in the same case for other mailing lists. Some suggested Google Groups. This kind of tool is really interesting since we can configure it to send mails for each message. So people wanting mails have their mails and can answer and people wanting a forum still have it. But it has several drawbacks, including it's Google so for an open source project it's not ideal. I think something that hasn't been cited is the poor readability of code posted by mails. It's juste aweful to me. You may have a trick for good formating but I think that's a good point for other systems, or at least complementary systems to mails. Le ven. 1 févr. 2019 à 23:20, Adrien Ricocotam <ricocotam@gmail.com> a écrit :
On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 9:21 AM Adrien Ricocotam <ricocotam@gmail.com> wrote:
On a forum (no matter the form), you can edit the original post. Thus, when something was unclear, false or needed an edit, the author (or others) can edit the original post. So when someone actually reads the original post, s-he doesn't have to read the 20 mails of clearing things up to have a clear idea of what's the proposal. This is a minus one for mailing lists in my opinion.
And then people wonder whether quoted text really aligns with the original post, whether "sort by post date/time" actually means what it says, and whether people have actually changed their stance while editing a post. No thank you. In accounting, git repositories, and mailing lists, you cannot edit the past - you can only post a follow-up. ChrisA
[Chris Angelico]
It's common etiquette to clearly label your edits. That's why you'll see people write "EDIT: I changed X, Y, and Z due to <this comment>". Reddit can show how long ago a given post was edited (if it was at all) and commenters can flag posts that were edited in a misleading way. There's also no inherent reason a forum couldn't keep and expose the full history of edits to each post. It would be interesting if you could link to a specific edit so when some one says "I don't understand X and you weren't clear about Z" you could edit your post to clarify and link to the edit in a response saying "I edited <http://www.google.com> my post to clarify. Thanks!" On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 4:29 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Feb 2, 2019 at 9:52 AM Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com> wrote:
Requires cooperation and discipline. You have no proof that someone didn't unintentionally (or even maliciously) change the content of the post to misrepresent someone.
Reddit can show how long ago a given post was edited (if it was at all) and commenters can flag posts that were edited in a misleading way. There's also no inherent reason a forum couldn't keep and expose the full history of edits to each post.
Sure, it's possible to keep them all. It's not easy to adequately *show* them unless someone specifically says "show me the history".
It would be interesting if you could link to a specific edit so when some one says "I don't understand X and you weren't clear about Z" you could edit your post to clarify and link to the edit in a response saying "I edited my post to clarify. Thanks!"
I've seen that. It tends to result in posts that say "I've edited my preceding post", which is just as spammy as a followup but still disrupts the conversation. Still can't see it as an advantage. Edits like that are great for something that's meant to be a lasting document. That's why a PEP can be edited, and it retains its full history. You can go back and look at everything. But the mailing list is a discussion forum, not a document showing the final state of a discussion. ChrisA
[Chris Angelico]
Any form of civil communication requires cooperation and discipline. [Chris Angelico]
A) As I said in the post you're quoting, it's not necessarily true that you have no proof. B) I don't know of any forum system that allows you to misrepresent some one else. Editing your own post maliciously can only be used to misrepresent what you said. Even then, if your edit history is available, any attempt to do so can be called out. [Chris Angelico]
That's a matter of interface design. It may be just as easy as un-collapsing responses. Hopefully, if the community isn't full of liars and jerks, I don't see why the edit history would need to be super easy to explore. [Chris Angelico]
Just saying "I've edited my preceding post" is not the same as being able to link to the edit so that the person can clearly see exactly how you addressed their question. [Chris Angelico]
Still can't see it as an advantage.
The advantage is that other people don't have to dig down into a conversation to get all the clarifications and explanations that would otherwise be missing in your original post. [Chris Angelico]
I don't see how it would hurt discussion to have both. You can keep the: "X doesn't make any sense and I don't get Y" comment *and* the response referencing where those points are addressed *and* the make the fully edited version of the OP visible *and* allow anyone to review the edit history. None of those things are mutually exclusive. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 5:02 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 05:36:09PM -0600, Abe Dillon wrote:
B) I don't know of any forum system that allows you to misrepresent some one else.
Core developer Brett Cannon has taken up editing other people's comments on github if he doesn't approve of their tone. I'm now proactively editing people's comments on issues so they are less aggressive, e.g. "You need" becomes "it would be great if", etc. https://twitter.com/brettsky/status/1006660998860640256 And later: If they don't like it then I will simply ban them. Take note of how many people responding to Brett think it is a wonderful idea. The ability to edit other people's posts is considered a feature, not a bug. Github (currently) provides the full history of edits to each post. Reddit just has a flag that shows you whether a post was edited or not. Isn't technology wonderful? -- Steven
On Sat, 2 Feb 2019 21:20:40 +1100 Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Those people are probably a small cultural bubble, though. Twitter and other social networks act like echo chambers, not as promoters of rational debate. I've found Brett's stance on this unacceptable and I think I've already said it. Regards Antoine.
* I didn't have time to read the whole convo' yet * I think linking to a tutorial on "how to use a mailing list" that shows some examples on popular email client like Gmail on android or Mail in iOS would be something really helpful to beginners. When they subscribe, a bot would send that link alongside a nice welcoming message.
This list IS hard for newcomers. I wish there was one place where I could read up on how to not feel like a noob.
On Sat, Feb 02, 2019 at 11:12:02AM -0500, James Lu wrote:
This list IS hard for newcomers. I wish there was one place where I could read up on how to not feel like a noob.
It has become unfashionable to link to this, because it is allegedly too elitest and unfriendly and not welcoming enough, but I still think it is extremely valuable: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html (Its also somewhat unpopular because the maintainer has become something of a politically Right-wing extremist.) If you think of *proposals* as a kind of question: "What are the Pros and Cons of this suggestion?" rather than "We must do this. I have spoken, make it so!" then the Smart Questions document is relevant. Do your research first. What have you tried? Have you tried to knock holes in your own proposal or are you so excited by the Pros that you are blind to the Cons? What do other languages do? Do they differ from Python in ways which matter to your proposal? Did you make even a feeble attempt to search the archives, Stackoverflow, etc, or just post the first ill-formed thought that came to your mind? If your proposal been asked before, unless you are bringing something new to the discussion, don't waste everyone's time covering old ground. -- Steven
On 2/3/2019 12:44 PM, James Lu wrote:
On Feb 2, 2019, at 7:17 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
That’s some great stuff, can we document it somewhere? I think it would benefit future proposers.
*This list* is documented at https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas. I think a short paragraph starting "Before you post a proposal, ...", based on what Steven posted above, would be a good idea, and as useful as 'respect the COC'. Please give it a go and post a proposed addition here. Once polished, a proposal for that page would go to the list owners if they don't notice it. python-ideas-owner at python.org -- Terry Jan Reedy
Agreed, thanks James for asking. And thanks for bringing up the issue of communication mode in different mediums, Robert. I personally think the type of discussions taking place on this list would be better suited to a more interactive or conversational medium. Is there already, or would anyone be opposed to the creation of a #python-ideas on a large IRC network? I'd hope discussions there can have the same weight, merit, community involvement, and potential for PEP-tracking ideas. I think accommodating different people's best communication modes is essential to the continued development of any community and project. -------- Original Message -------- On Feb 1, 2019, 10:21, Robert Vanden Eynde wrote:
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 05:43:54PM +0000, Alex Shafer via Python-ideas wrote:
That biases the community against people who aren't available to chat at the same time as the majority. E,g, people in different time zones, or who work or have other committments during which time they can't take part in the discussion. The beauty of email is that it sits in your inbox until you get a chance to respond, even if that is a few days later. In IRC, you might have a window of opportunity of a few hours. In a busy chat room, it might be a few seconds before the comment you are replying to disappears off screen into irrelevance. IRC encourages one sentence replies. There really isn't room for complex reasoning or long debates. It is good for simple answers and knee-jerk responses. -- Steve
I've pitched this before but gotten little feedback (especially positive feedback), but I think a Reddit-style forum would be a pretty vast improvement. We could easily start a python_ideas subreddit to try it out. I know the google group presents threaded conversations, but I've run into enough bugs trying to use that platform that I now only interact with python-ideas via my gmail account, and threads are flattened here. Also, a Reddit-style forum has voting built in. As a bonus, we can write moderation bots and present useful info in the side-bar. If people find Reddit distasteful or otherwise a bad idea, maybe we can find some forum software that replicates the feature set of Reddit and host it ourselves? On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 10:41 AM James Lu <jamtlu@gmail.com> wrote:
If any non-email system is adopted, it will exclude me, and probably many other contributors to this list. A mailing list is an appropriate and useful format. "Discussion systems" are not. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 1:36 PM Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com> wrote:
-- Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
On 01Feb2019 12:35, Abe Dillon <abedillon@gmail.com> wrote:
Bear in mind that many participants here are against forums, myself included. A mailing list comes to me, its user interface is as _I_ want it rather than a single web based interface, and it isn't a web page. My laptop collects my email constantly in the background; I can read and reply to email while offline because the messages are local and my laptop has a working mail system which queues. Email comes to me; a forum must be visited.
The flatness of threads is a mail reader artifact. I'm no fan of the GMail web interface on a personal basis. I use mutt, and have it configured to fold up read threads and unfold threads with unread content. The point here is that with email there are many many clients and one should find one which suits your preferred interface and behaviour. With a web interface this is basicly not a choice. And IMO web browsers are terrible email readers. Some systems like discourse offer a web interface and also email. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 12:35:15PM -0600, Abe Dillon wrote:
I don't think you need anyone's permission to do so. Provided you don't try to pass it off as in any way official or blessed by the PSF (not to be confused with the Python Secret Underground which most emphatically does not exist) you might as well try it and see what happens. But some reasons why I am luke-warm on the idea: - I can have as many email identities as I like; I can only have one Reddit identity at a time. If I want to keep my Reddit persona seperate from my Python persona, I need to create multiple accounts (possibly violating the terms of service?) and remember to log out of one and into the other. - Too difficult (impossible?) to keep local human-readable copies of either the discussion thread, or even your own posts. - I have to explicitly go to the site to see what is happening, rather than have the posts automatically arrive in my inbox. - Ads. - Reddit's new web UI. (How long before the "old.reddit..." URLs stop working?) -- Steven
Note: none of the following is an endorsement of the r/python_ideas idea. I'm just responding point-by-point to what you wrote. On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 10:47 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
- I can have as many email identities as I like; I can only have one Reddit identity at a time.
Do you mean because your browser doesn't support per-window or per-tab cookie jars? I'm pretty sure there are browsers that do. (I use multiple instances of the same browser with different home directories to solve this general problem, but I think there are other solutions.) Also, many clients (including RES in a browser) support switching accounts by choosing from a drop-down list.
It isn't a violation of the TOS and it's extremely common and people are open about it. It is a TOS violation to, for instance, up/downvote the same post/comment with two of your accounts.
- Too difficult (impossible?) to keep local human-readable copies of either the discussion thread, or even your own posts.
I agree the Reddit client situation is pretty sad compared to the email client situation, but non-browser clients do exist. You don't have to use Reddit in a browser. RES lets you save things locally, but you are still stuck viewing them in a browser.
- I have to explicitly go to the site to see what is happening, rather than have the posts automatically arrive in my inbox.
Well, you can get an RSS feed of any subreddit or comment thread and stick that in your email client. It's not perfect I agree.
From another of your messages:
Reddit doesn't allow anyone but the original user to edit posts or comments. Moderators (ordinary users who are selected per subreddit like IRC ops) can only remove the entire text of a comment (or text post) and put "[removed]" in its place. They can also make posts no longer appear on the subreddit, but they continue to be viewable if you have the direct url. There was a scandal in which a Reddit co-founder admitted to editing someone's comment. I think he was able to do that because he had direct database access. If someone has direct database access then of course a full edit history won't help since you can bypass that along with everything else. I am definitely a fan of the distributed nature of email. However, a rogue admin of python.org or their registrar or ISP or some Internet switch could alter emails to this list without leaving any edit history. Proper authentication could solve a lot of that, but as long as we're dreaming, it's only fair to make Reddit distributed and not-for-profit too.
James Lu schrieb am 01.02.19 um 17:40:
A lot of the traffic on this email list is people saying “I don’t understand” or “that’s not what I meant” or trying to re-explain. A lot of “-1”s are really “I don’t see the usefulness of this”.
So I want an open discussion on: How can we communicate clearer?
While I agree with others that this is a good question worth asking, I also think that it's somewhat the nature of this list that a) the topics discussed here often require a good understanding of Python and the workings of the language, b) the described use cases and ideas are often novel and therefore may not immediately ring bells in everyone's ears, and c) many topics are recurring, so people who give a quick "-1" may just be reluctant to discuss them all over again without expecting new facets to appear (which rarely happens, in fact, although there are famously PEP-ed exceptions). And, last but not least, "I don't see the usefulness of this" is a perfectly valid counter-argument, especially for a well designed language like Python. I can think of at least one programming language that was not so lucky to have enough people say this. Stefan
On Fri, Feb 01, 2019 at 11:40:37AM -0500, James Lu wrote:
So I want an open discussion on: How can we communicate clearer?
Remember the Curse of Knowledge: just because you know something, don't imagine that all your readers know it too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/the-curse-of-knowledge-pinker-... https://sites.williams.edu/nk2/files/2011/08/Curse_of_Knowledge.pdf Try putting yourself in the reader's position. Will they understand what you are talking about? Re-read (and edit) your email for clarity before you hit send. Read your own email when it arrives in your inbox. If there are any major mistakes or confusing bits, reply to the list and clarify. With luck, maybe people will read your clarification before they respond. Try not to make rapid-fire knee-jerk responses to other people. (I know that's one bit of advice I personally find hard to follow.) Try to write clear and precise language. https://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/style_purpose_strategy/writi... But note that *clear* and *precise* are often opposed to each other. The page above gives an example: The biota exhibited a one hundred percent mortality response. All the fish died. but the two sentences don't mean the same thing. (In the first, *everything* died; in the second, only the fish died.) Jargon is a double-edged sword for this reason: not everyone will know what the jargon means, but for those that do, jargon terms are both concise and precise in ways that plain English terms usually are not. As programmers, we use a lot of jargon, but remember than not everyone has the same background. My obvious technical term may be your obfuscatory gibberish. If you expect that a jargon term will be unfamiliar, either explain what you mean, or give a link to a site that explains it. If you're not sure whether a jargon term will be unfamiliar to others, remember the Curse of Knowledge: it probably will be. Remember that *most ideas are bad* -- that is equally true here as on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Most_ideas_are_bad Be critical about your own ideas before you post. Try to anticipate objections. Either you will decide the objections are right, or you may be able to pre-empt them. Have a bit of humility: just because others disagree with you, doesn't mean that they haven't understood you. Perhaps they have understood your idea and its consequences better than you have yourself. It is *really hard* to read criticism of your ideas, but necessary. If the criticism was valid, then either your idea needs to fixed to avoid the problems given, or it needs to be abandoned as unfixable. Remember too that sometimes there is no right or wrong answer, just a matter of taste, or of value judgements. This especially applies when there are trade-offs involved. As a language, Python makes many trade-offs (as do all other languages). Some ideas are not bad in and of themselves, but they go against those trade-offs and consequently aren't a good fit for Python. On the flip side, sometimes we're too quick to reject ideas because they've never been done before. For some definition of "never". (Usually "never that I know of, not that I've looked too closely, or at all".) In my experience, Python programmers tend to be very conservative, perhaps more so than in other communities. Like cats, we often dislike things merely because they are new and different. Consequently sometimes its just a matter of patience and timing. Python as a language rarely is a trend-setter. Let other languages take the risks, we'll steal the ideas that work and leave those that don't. This conservativeness is only getting worse, as more of the core devs decide that we ought to slow the pace of change down even more, perhaps even halt it completely. I don't know what can be done about that. (Biologists have a word for complex systems which are stable: "dead".) -- Steven
Thanks Steve, that’s a good point, I might have been in one of the bad things you describe. It’s kinda funny that Python is conservative while being heavily used in the most recent techonologies (referring to machine learning). I personally think it’s not good but I might be too young for being conservative. Just a point about writing clear and precise English. For a good part of the audience and the writers, English is not our native language. Even if I’m considered good in English according to the standards in France, will far from being bilingual and expressing myself in English is not that easy. Technical discussions are not easy, no matter the language. Using a different language is harder and makes it really difficult some times. That’s why, in my case, I felt I mis expressed myself and proposed explanations on the answers I gave : I thought that was not clear because I’m not English-speaker. Another point, if when answering you (and others including me) you understood farther than the author, juste say what you understood further and all the implications. It will benefit everyone and discard ambiguities (especially for new-comers). On Sat 2 Feb 2019 at 13:45, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Sat, 2 Feb 2019 at 13:55, Adrien Ricocotam <ricocotam@gmail.com> wrote:
Just a point about writing clear and precise English. For a good part of the audience and the writers, English is not our native language. Even if I’m considered good in English according to the standards in France, will far from being bilingual and expressing myself in English is not that easy. Technical discussions are not easy, no matter the language. Using a different language is harder and makes it really difficult some times. That’s why, in my case, I felt I mis expressed myself and proposed explanations on the answers I gave : I thought that was not clear because I’m not English-speaker.
One point I will make - for myself (and maybe for the other native English speakers here) I find it really hard to determine when someone here is not a native speaker, basically because in general their English is so good that it's hard to tell! (I certainly couldn't communicate in any way effectively in French, which is the only language I could even claim to have a basic grasp of outside of English). So I'm sure some misunderstandings come from simply assuming people meant what they said, when in fact they were trying to say something slightly different, but didn't realise the nuances. It's hard to know what to do about this. As an English speaker I try to remember that not everyone is a native speaker, but being able to communicate effectively in another language *at all* is sufficiently foreign to my experience that I can't really understand the implications of being in that position. And expecting non-native speakers to continually remind us that they are speaking in a language other than their native one is unreasonable - not least because they are communicating better than many native speakers (in my experience). I guess the best answer is the usual one - assume good faith on everyone's part, and forgive minor inaccuracies. Also, while pedantic precision is common in technical discussions (and speaking for myself, something I often overindulge in for the fun of it...) it's better avoided in discussions on the list, where the fine distinctions involved may be lost on other participants. Paul
On Sat, 2 Feb 2019 at 06:12, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
Agreed 100%. There's also a cultural difference between, even, the UK and the US, whereby I'll mean certain things one way and have others interpret it differently. For example, the expression to "table" something, means the opposite across the pond. When my American colleagues say things like "let's table that", I always have to pinch myself to realise that means "put it off" and not "talk about it right now". And I **am** a native English speaker, despite what my name would lead some to believe. The above written, I have found that the python community, insofar as I've interacted with it, is more understanding and tolerant of these communication nuances when compared to other communities. -- H One point I will make - for myself (and maybe for the other native
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The community is really opened on the subject and I didn't receive any bad feelings about my English writing. I just wanted to remember everyone that a lot of us are non-native and despite the fact we speak well, we might not actually transmit exactly what we thought, nor understand what was meant. It's already not always the case when speaking native language. Actually my paragraph was more a point to introduce the following one : detailing what we said doesn't necessary mean we think the other is dumb. A lot of my sentence formulations are inspires by french and might mislead the understanding. A french would probably get what I mean, non-french will probably not. But we're focusing on something that's not the central subject here (even though it's pretty important). Le sam. 2 févr. 2019 à 15:30, Hasan Diwan <hasan.diwan@gmail.com> a écrit :
participants (18)
-
Abe Dillon -
Adrien Ricocotam -
Alex Shafer -
Antoine Pitrou -
Ben Rudiak-Gould -
Cameron Simpson -
Chris Angelico -
Dan Sommers -
David Mertz -
Greg Ewing -
Hasan Diwan -
James Lu -
Marcos Eliziario -
Paul Moore -
Robert Vanden Eynde -
Stefan Behnel -
Steven D'Aprano -
Terry Reedy