dont laugh

Ian Hobson ian.hobson at ntlworld.com
Mon Sep 4 07:03:27 EDT 2000


In article <8orlkh010m at news2.newsguy.com>, Alex Martelli
<aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes
>But the "real estate" available for this purpose is limited, and
>it depends on the user's choices WHAT few programs he'll
>want to privilege this way.  It's certainly peculiar to argue
>that a program "MUST" (uppercase in the original) be among
>the very few thus singled out "by default", in order to be able
>to teach about that program's use at all.
>
>Similarly, if a program "MUST" (uppercase) be pre-installed,
>or else stand zero chance to be taught, it must be a peculiar
>program indeed.  99.7% of programs (including programming
>languages' compilers/interpreter/IDEs...) must make do without
>the huge marketing advantage of pre-installation, and yet they
>manage.  What would single Python out so much, that it MUST
>be pre-installed with the OS or else stand no chance...?
>
>I think describing this thesis as "poppycock" would be slightly
>too charitable and urbane, so I'll refrain from expressing what
>I actually think of it...
Alex,

I do not care for being quoted out of context, and them dammed for what
I did not say. I think it is downright rude, ill mannered and self
serving and offensive. 

I wrote
>Python MUST run "out of the box" (even on win32 - which it does not) >
>and then the ideas can be explained. 

When I installed Python, it would only run scripts in one directory,
and, being clean of habit, I had placed my source in a special source
directory. Paths and associations need to be set up. 

I said nothing about pre-installation. 

Regards

Ian Hobson 

Every time we teach a child something, we prevent him from inventing 
it himself. - Jean Piaget



More information about the Python-list mailing list