[Python-Dev] How far to go with user-friendliness

[Antoine Pitrou]

Frankly, this kind of inept discussion, where a bunch of folks get hung
up about an extremely minor design decision (who cares whether "assret"
is being special-cased or not? in the actual world, not the fantasy
world of righteous indignation and armchair architects?), is amongst
the reasons why I'm stopping contributing to CPython.

Keep up the good work, you're making this place totally repulsive to
participate in. Every maintainer or contributor now has an army of
voluntary hair-splitters to bother about, most of whom probably aren't
relying on said functionality to begin with.

Regards

Antoine.



On Fri, 17 Jul 2015 15:11:59 -0700
Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:
> On 07/16/2015 11:30 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> > On 17 July 2015 at 08:30, Ben Finney wrote:
> 
> >> By definition, advocating to not add cruft to an API is going to be in
> >> advance of being bitten by those additions.
> >
> > That's not what people are doing. Folks are actually arguing for
> > *restoring* the ability to mock out method names starting with
> > "assret_*".
> 
> Why is that surprising?  As somebody already mentioned (Terry, I think?) "assret" is a fine abbreviation, as well as possibly being a foreign word.
> 
> > I still don't know why anyone thinks restoring that would be a
> > worthwhile use of a maintainers' time (or why they thinking arguing in
> > favour of such a capability is a worthwhile use of theirs).
> 
> 1) Because it shouldn't have been added in the first place.
> 
> 2) Because DWIM does not belong in Python.
> 
> > None of the perspectives presented in this thread are new, although
> > the apparent obsession over such a minor detail has made it abundantly
> > clear that this kind of helper simply isn't worth 		the distraction it
> > creates for maintainers, *regardless* of whether or not it helps end
> > users.
> 
> To be clear:
> 
>    - those who are upset over "assret" are not upset over "assert"
> 
>    - it is not Python's job (nor the stdlib's) to correct spelling errors
> 
> --
> ~Ethan~