Newbie: finding the key/index of the min/max element

[Alex Martelli]

Laura Creighton wrote:
        ...
> All of this was personal.  You can't hide behind 'other men' or 'other
> Americans'.  Francois Pinard, Cliff Wells, Steve Holden, Tim Delaney,
> I, and I forget who else who helped are not going to sit around idlely
> while you turn c.l.p into a 'sarcasm friendly' place.  We will fight
> you over this.  This is an extremely interesting and to my mind
> important social experiement, and you aren't going to find many people
> who will support you in your efforts to turn this place into just
> another newsgroup.

Actually, _I_ wouldn't mind it if there was a way to discourage people
from starting Yet Another Round of language-change proposals or whines
and complaints against some aspect of the language they have not
carefully considered.  "I don't understand why 'split' should be a
method of the joiner rather than of the sequence" is one thing, and,
even though often explored in the past, deserves courteous response if
one has the time and patience to repeat it (or pointing to a FAQ, etc).

But too often you see the very different attitude of "I _don't like_
the fact that 'join' is a method of the joiner rather than of the
sequence", all the way up the scale of increasing arrogance to "I
*know* that 'join' SHOULD be a method of the sequence rather than
of the joiner and thus you should change the language to suit my
whims".  It does seem to me that such arrogance is Excessively
Annoying Behavior, and if sarcastic and aggressive reactions could
discourage it, then I wouldn't mind.  I don't know if they can, as
much of it comes from people who can't be bothered to read previous
messages (obviously: they ignore arguments that have been made over
and over again!), and thus don't know about previous flamewars either.

_On a given thread_, however, _once reasonable and informative
responses have been given and wilfully ignored_, I can see the case
for lashing out (I can also see the opposite case as you present
it -- problem with being a Libra, this 360 degrees vision:-).  And
my instincts are surely to go for the jugular in such cases (while
my time-management reasonable self tells me I don't have TIME for
another flamewar -- but then, I don't have time to remind people
for the 1000th time that performance must be measured, not guessed
at, yet I do...:-).

I don't think it's at all reasonable to unleash attacks against
proposals you disagree with, just because you do disagree.  But
I just hope I'll be in one of my time-management-necessitated
periods of abstinence from this group next time some newbie
arrogantly and querulously teaches us why Python should have
[a] explicit block delimiters, [b] join as a method of all the
possible sequences and not of joiner-objects, [c] hygienic
macros, [d] booleans -- oops forget I mentioned the latter, since
they're now BDFL-blessed cruf^H^H^H^H brilliant innovations...:-).


Alex