[Python-ideas] Retire or reword the "Beautiful is better than ugly" Zen clause

[David Mertz]

On Sun, Sep 16, 2018, 4:34 AM Stephen J. Turnbull <
turnbull.stephen.fw at u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:

> I would also disagree with Greg Ewing's take on "robot".  It may have
> meant "slave" in the original Czech, but in English it has strong
> connotations of "automaton" and an inherent lack of autonomy, quite
> different from a human slave's flexibility to perform any command,


Robot doesn't mean "slave" in Czech, but rather "serf." Serfdom was/is a
terrible institution, but nothing best so terrible as the Atlantic slave
trade of the 15th-19th C which is what modern usage tends to indicates.
Moreover, the morpheme "rōb" is commonplace in Slavic languages to mean
"work" in a more general sense.

Wikipedia: Karl Čapek's fictional story postulated the technological
creation of artificial human bodies without souls, and the old theme of the
feudal robota class eloquently fit the imagination of a new class of
manufactured, artificial workers.
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