lacking follow-through

C

castironpi

I am concerned by the lack of follow-through on some responses to
recent ideas I have described. Do I merely have a wrong understanding
of group policy? Is it a good policy (defined with respect to the
future of Python and the welfare of humans at large) if so? Is there
a serious lack of diligence, or should I merely take more initiative,
and ignore charges of 'pestering'? (Warning, moderately deep outside
social issues on table too.)
 
J

James Mills

Hi,

This is the strangest post I've seen
since I've joined this list (only
recently). What the ?

cheers
James
 
G

Gabriel Genellina

I am concerned by the lack of follow-through on some responses to
recent ideas I have described. Do I merely have a wrong understanding
of group policy? Is it a good policy (defined with respect to the
future of Python and the welfare of humans at large) if so? Is there
a serious lack of diligence, or should I merely take more initiative,
and ignore charges of 'pestering'? (Warning, moderately deep outside
social issues on table too.)

Maybe people just doesn't have anything to say?
Last thing I remember from you, is some mmap-based tree, and I'm not interested.
 
M

Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch

This is the strangest post I've seen
since I've joined this list (only
recently). What the ?

Yeah, castironpi sometimes doesn't make much sense. Maybe because it's a
bot!? :)

Ciao,
Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch
 
C

castironpi

Yeah, castironpi sometimes doesn't make much sense.  Maybe because it's a
bot!?  :)

Ciao,
        Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch

No, I'm legit, and I believe my complaint is. That's all I can
guarantee anyway. While I'm still not a vet on Usenet, I'm still
disappointed so far. Though I should be flattered for my logic to be
ever compared to an A.I.'s.

Maybe the ideas are not that groundbreaking, but they still have been
dropped instead of critiqued. Problem.
 
F

Fredrik Lundh

Marc said:
Yeah, castironpi sometimes doesn't make much sense. Maybe because it's a
bot!? :)

if so, they sure don't make c.l.py bots like they used to, do they?

</F>
 
S

Steven D'Aprano

Hi,

This is the strangest post I've seen
since I've joined this list (only
recently). What the ?

Oh don't mind castironpi, many people think he's an IRC bot with some
experimental AI features that escaped onto Usenet *grins*. If you think
that post of his was strange, you haven't seen anything yet. Many people
have kill-filed him, and never even see his posts.

A word to castironpi: you just suggested you will pester the list to get
a response. It's behaviour like that which gets you kill-filed. If you
would spend one tenth of the effort that you spend on understand Python
on understanding human psychology, you will probably get on with others
much better and find fewer people claiming you're a bot.

Even if you yourself don't understand how others behave and expect you to
behave, think of it as an intellectual puzzle: how can I fool the strange
hairless apes into accepting me into their herd?
 
C

castironpi

Oh don't mind castironpi, many people think he's an IRC bot with some
experimental AI features that escaped onto Usenet *grins*. If you think
that post of his was strange, you haven't seen anything yet. Many people
have kill-filed him, and never even see his posts.

A word to castironpi: you just suggested you will pester the list to get
a response. It's behaviour like that which gets you kill-filed. If you
would spend one tenth of the effort that you spend on understand Python
on understanding human psychology, you will probably get on with others
much better and find fewer people claiming you're a bot.

Even if you yourself don't understand how others behave and expect you to
behave, think of it as an intellectual puzzle: how can I fool the strange
hairless apes into accepting me into their herd?

First, gauge their persistence tolerance. Some people are not
persistent enough. I don't want to annoy you, and I want to show
interest, but of course no more than I actually feel. Are my
standards too low, or too high?

Second, debate the reverse psychology tack. Claim I'm a bot to shake
their belief? Or call them bots? Perhaps they are. Bots with
cooties. Yes.
 
P

Paul Boddie

I am concerned by the lack of follow-through on some responses to
recent ideas I have described. Do I merely have a wrong understanding
of group policy?

I think some people have taken exception to your contributions
previously, which I believe exhibits a certain degree of
shortsightedness on their part, considering for example the recent
thread which brought up just-in-time compilation techniques where
there were pretty valid reasons for keeping the thread going.
Certainly, it wasn't as if the level of discussion was stuck at basic
contradiction or mudslinging, and even if reading the different papers
on the topic might help an inquirer on the matter, there's certainly
nothing wrong with seeking guidance over which papers might be the
best ones, nor with seeking some kind of context for that work within
the realm of Python implementations, especially given the recent glut
of news on virtual machine improvements for other dynamic languages.
Is it a good policy (defined with respect to the
future of Python and the welfare of humans at large) if so? Is there
a serious lack of diligence, or should I merely take more initiative,
and ignore charges of 'pestering'? (Warning, moderately deep outside
social issues on table too.)

I'm no expert on getting other people to embrace ideas, but here's my
advice anyway. If you have an idea and can describe it coherently,
please do so; this won't guarantee positive responses, but there may
be people out there who feel that you're onto something. If the idea
has merit - generally, the most reliable way to know involves you
personally experiencing difficulties in a problem area where the idea
in question promises to alleviate some of those difficulties - then by
developing that idea, typically producing something that others can
try out, people will know that you mean business. Alternatively,
people might point you to existing work that will address the problems
you're having, saving you the bother of having to write a load of code
to enact that idea of yours.

You can be lucky and have people chasing you down over what you've
produced, but I'd argue that most of the time, for any given idea
which becomes a project, you'll have a few people interested in what
you've done, but the motivation for continuing will be something that
will depend on yourself and your own needs. You have to accept that
even if you think that people (and Python) might be well served in
listening to what you have to say, that message may go unheard.

Once upon a time, the BDFL and the most central core developers used
to read comp.lang.python and ideas about Python's future were
exchanged readily. Today, all lobbying takes place on the python-dev/
3000/ideas mailing lists, but those lists are more conservative with
regard to contributions than comp.lang.python (python-list). Perhaps
as a consequence, the divide between those steering the language and
those using it has grown: "producers" use the aforementioned lists,
"consumers" argue with each other on the newsgroup, and it might be in
the release notes that you learn about happenings that previously
would have been reported more widely elsewhere. Certainly, influencing
the future of Python, at least officially, is a lot more hard work
than it used to be.

One may decide to worry about this, along with matters like how Python
will remain able to compete with other languages and platforms. I
regard the future development of Python as a process which may not
necessarily serve my interests, but since the community around Python
is so much larger and more diverse than those following every last
Python 3.0 commit, I see no need to become agitated by the direction
of the language developers. Since Python is Free Software one has,
after all, a lot of flexibility when deciding who to associate with
and who to influence, and it is ultimately only through trying to
achieve things with the technology that one's priorities (or the
things one should be worrying about) emerge. For me, then, influencing
Python 3.x isn't a priority since I have enough to be thinking about
and working on, and I wonder if I'll ever do anything with Python 3.x
anyway.

So, I suppose, the message is this: follow your own interests, make
contributions in the ways that make sense to you, seek contact with
like-minded developers in groups which might be remote from mainstream
Python development (find an appropriate, potentially specialised
audience); these things will define any need you may have to influence
others.

Paul
 
C

castironpi

I think it's like duck typing: it doesn't matter whether he's actually
a bot, only whether he behaves like one.

Do you support the bot interface and methods?
 
A

Asun Friere

I am concerned by the lack of follow-through on some responses to
recent ideas I have described. Do I merely have a wrong understanding
of group policy?

[snip]

Perhaps the wrong idea of what the group is. I would have thought
that
if one had a sufficiently developed idea and wanted to have it /
formally/
rejected, rather than merely sniped at, then writting a PEP would be
more
apposite than posting to c.l.py.

It's fine to post your not sufficiently developed ideas here merely
to
have them discussed. But I don't know what makes you feel that you,
or
your ideas, are /entitled/ to any response at all, much less
"follow-through."
 
E

Eric Wertman

Perhaps the wrong idea of what the group is. I would have thought
that
if one had a sufficiently developed idea and wanted to have it /
formally/
rejected, rather than merely sniped at, then writting a PEP would be
more
apposite than posting to c.l.py.

It's fine to post your not sufficiently developed ideas here merely
to
have them discussed. But I don't know what makes you feel that you,
or
your ideas, are /entitled/ to any response at all, much less
"follow-through."


To expand on this a little bit, I've been subscribed to this group
for a couple of months, but there seems to be a bit more gray area
between what would go to a 'python-dev' group and a 'python-user'
group. Long debates about language features and abstract ideas would
appeal to the former, but not the latter. Certainly I fall into the
user category.. I'm pretty happy with python, and generally just
adjust to it's design and features, rather than spend lots of time on
whether they are 'right' or could be 'better'. /shrug
 
C

castironpi

Yeah, suggestions about changing the language are much better suited
to the more-specific Python-ideas or Python-3000 mailinglists than the
general-purpose c.l.p
- Chris

Some of the core devs from Python-Ideas have suggested that I get some
of my ideas started on c.l.py. Also, I'm looking for people to
connect with and interact with about Python and none of the core devs
have time, which makes c.l.py the place. I'm starting to get
discouraged, as though there's no one really interested in this cool
thing I'm thinking of. Or did I just not describe it well? It would
be safe to assume that people read my post, understood it, and weren't
interested, except that a few replies came, and then it was dropped
without any obvious explanation.

Further, and I'm sad to report this, I found tempers really high
strung on the Ideas list, so c.l.py may have more potential anyway,
with more young and flexible users. Not to say that the core devs are
old or brittle or anything, just that their time is already devoted
and they don't have time for people like me.
 
T

Terry Reedy

The py-dev mailing list, and its gmane.comp.python.devel mirror, is for
concrete discussion, mostly by developers, of how to develop the current
and next release. The current focus in on finishing 2.6 for release.

Almost nothing that has appeared here recently belongs there. It is
much more common for people to post there usage questions that belong
here or speculative issues that could also go to python-ideas.

Long rehashes of decided issues, like the name of subprocess.popen, or
the default of sum(), belong here better than anywhere else, if anywhere
;-).
Yeah, suggestions about changing the language are much better suited
to the more-specific Python-ideas or Python-3000 mailinglists than the
general-purpose c.l.p

The Python-3000 mailing list, and the gmane.comp.python.python-3.devel
mirror, is the py-dev equivalent for python3-specific issues.

tjr
 
R

Robert Kern

Eric said:
To expand on this a little bit, I've been subscribed to this group
for a couple of months, but there seems to be a bit more gray area
between what would go to a 'python-dev' group and a 'python-user'
group. Long debates about language features and abstract ideas would
appeal to the former, but not the latter. Certainly I fall into the
user category.. I'm pretty happy with python, and generally just
adjust to it's design and features, rather than spend lots of time on
whether they are 'right' or could be 'better'. /shrug

Actually, python-dev is for the concrete development of Python. Releases, bugs,
and occasionally design discussions for relevant features. Long debates about
potential features and abstract ideas belong either here or python-ideas.

--
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
 

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