What does Python fix?

[François Pinard]

[Mike C. Fletcher]

> The greatest minds of all time have almost invariably failed to follow
> the cultural norms of their time.

Maybe.  But escaping norms is surely no guarantee of a great mind! :-)
Proper quoting is an art, which gets more and more diluted, as the Internet
gets more democratic.  One should quote no more than necessary, and just
in time to re-establish the context for the reader.  Many of us follow
more than one conversation at a time, and do not like paging down into a
massive quote, just to get a clue about where fits a reply.

Proper quoting looks like mere politeness to me.  If I spoil the time of
all of my correspondents to save a bit of mine, I'm not very considerate.

> IMO, it is silly to focus too much on the forms, to ossify ourselves into
> a strict and fussy set of guidelines,

Even if I'm not an English speaker, I appreciate your prose as well written,
nicely punctuated, with no gross orthographical nor typographical mistake.
This may be part of the forms and conventions, but still, it produces an
aesthetical pleasure to your readers.  Common guidelines are part of the
comfort of a society, they are important.

The same is true for the Python language.  It sets many guidelines,
some of them are rigidly enforced, like indentation.  Others, from the
Guido style recommendations, are usually welcome in the code we share.
Such things make the sharing much more pleasurable, this is important.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard