Could you please stop posting flamewar comments, in particular about Python? You've done it repeatedly in this thread, as well as on many other occasions (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38010109), and we've already had to ask you more than once to stop:
This is not about Python, it's about not having tedious squabbles (or worse) on HN. We'd make the same request of any user on any topic. Sometimes a commenter is fixated on a particular topic, can't let go, and posts way too many low-quality and/or hostile comments about it. That's definitely not an ok use of HN, and we eventually have to ban such accounts.
Well, as to the news guidelines... I'm sorry to say this, but they are either very easy to interpret many different ways, or are very frequently violated. I'm not complaining though. Any rule-based system to govern societies big or small will either be too rigid, or to prone to individual (mis-)interpretation.
As for tedious squabbles, you seem to be the only one commenting on this post. You also don't seem to be interested in the subject. So, I don't see much potential for the squabble.
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Anyhow. Since you welcomed a meta-response... here's another story. This time not a folk tale.
Before Adobe bought Macromedia, Macromedia was in the process of revamping its tooling and workflows around Flash. They've created an open-source framework that included a compiler -- something that allowed for a much wider audience to start writing in ActionScript. They also significantly upgraded the language. The transition from AS2 to AS3 was in some ways more difficult than from Python 2.X to Python 3.X. Similar to how Python transition created a lot of zealotry, everyone in the world of Flash who wanted to post their opinion on the Web was cursing the old and praising the new.
At the time I was a moderator on a user board dedicated to Flash and ActionScript. Just like everyone around me, I was hyped up about the advent of the new version of the language. Well, it wasn't every one though. There was one member of the forum who found himself in opposition to everyone around himself. He believed that the transition to AS3 was without merit, for show, a waste of time.
Every time he'd appear in any forum thread, the discussion would inevitably shift towards AS2 vs AS3. At the time I thought he was ridiculously wrong... but the actual problem wasn't him being wrong. It was the quality of counter-arguments. Whenever someone disagreed with him, the counter-argument was laughably bad. So, let's call him "the AS2 guy", would spend time deconstructing the counter-argument showing how it's just a bad argument... but it was too much to read, and by the time there was a reply, there'd be a queue of more counter-arguments of similarly laughably low quality.
Not surprisingly, the AS2 guy would get upset, threads would grow very long, eventually mods would start deleting posts and... temporary ban the AS2 guy. That is until we banned him permanently. I kind of felt bad for the guy, but thought it was for the greater good...
As you can imagine, I believe I was wrong to ban him (well, the decision wasn't entirely mine, but that's going into too much detail). But this isn't the only thing I came to regret following the development of Web forums over last few decades. Below are some unfortunate revelations that I had at different times in connection to public discourse:
* Opinions of more knowledgeable people are more polarized.
* Most people in programming trade, if compared to other knowledge workers, have very little knowledge of their own trade.
* Programmers have many naive beliefs about other areas of knowledge, believing ourselves to be experts in those fields for no good reason. This is particularly relevant when talking about programmers designing rules for online communities.
As a result, programmers are very prone to creating self-reinforcing information bubbles. Designing and manipulating the rules of the system to secure a win of the opinion they subscribe to instead of refining their opinion to account for counter-arguments. The systems thus built are made to be less and less tolerant of a difference of opinion. Every superficially inclusive initiative, s.a. popular today "codes of conduct", becomes an instrument for fighting dissent.
So, to tie back the story to the argument I'm trying to make: yes, of course I think Python is an awful technology. Yes, I never pretended that the people behind it are doing a good job. It's awful and it only gets worse. I also wrote plenty about the "why" side of things. I've never came across anything close to a convincing argument to the opposite, not here not in any other public forum that discusses Python. But there's often a lot of laughably bad arguments.
If you choose to see my opinion as a violation of the forum rules -- that's up to you of course. But banning me for this will not make Python better, nor will it have any impact on my opinion, nor on my willingness to share it. It will, however, make some people feel better about themselves for a while. There's of course a possibility of remorse, but it doesn't come to everyone, and definitely not in a timely way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38270168 (Nov 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37807607 (Oct 2023)
This is not about Python, it's about not having tedious squabbles (or worse) on HN. We'd make the same request of any user on any topic. Sometimes a commenter is fixated on a particular topic, can't let go, and posts way too many low-quality and/or hostile comments about it. That's definitely not an ok use of HN, and we eventually have to ban such accounts.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.