c.l.py dead, news at 11 (was Re: Mangle function name with decorator?)

[Aahz]

In article <mailman.2814.1238202924.11746.python-list at python.org>,
andrew cooke <andrew at acooke.org> wrote:
>
>c.l.python used to be the core of a community built around a language.  It
>no longer is.  It is a very useful place, where some very helpful and
>knowledgeable people hang out and give advice, but instead of representing
>the full interests of the Python community it is now very much a resource
>for helping new users.

It seems to me that you're making two separate assertions here.  I don't
think that c.l.py ever represented the full interests of the Python
community once python-dev took off (which was essentially before I
started using Python in 1999).  I do think that c.l.py is still in many
ways the core of the community, because it's the only hangout where the
disparate parts of the community come together, but the core has
diminished to a small fraction of the whole community.

>I feel quite strongly about this.  I thought that c.l.python was almost
>exceptional in the range (the perl group was another, similar community
>back then).  I do worry that someone might have screwed up in a quite
>major way, and that Python will suffer seriously, in the longer term, as a
>result.

>From my POV as someone who has been observing Usenet for eighteen years,
c.l.py is *still* an exceptional community.  And while Usenet is now an
Internet backwater, there's far too much useful traffic to claim that
Usenet is in any danger of dying.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"At Resolver we've found it useful to short-circuit any doubt and just
refer to comments in code as 'lies'. :-)"
--Michael Foord paraphrases Christian Muirhead on python-dev, 2009-3-22