slightly OT: BUT NEEDs to be said

[Nomen Nescio]

In article <lvOdnRJzZ9244ezdRVn-uQ at powergate.ca>, Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com>
wrote:

> Some people despise snakes, and are terrified of them.

Everyone loves cute cuddly snakes and no one in their right mind is afraid
of them. They don't carry any political baggage or meaning.

> 
> Nor, perhaps, should you bring politics into your arguments, at least
> not if you want to maintain credibility with a largely technical crowd.

I think politics are introduced when the author uses MPFC as the basis. 

> So clearly you haven't used it even enough to get past this concern
> about indentation, which generally goes away after only a few days
> or perhaps weeks of use.  That hurts your credibility as well...

Ok. Well the indentation thing which is largely irrelivant...

> If you've managed to read this far, which I doubt, then I want you
> to know that you might actually have a point.  At least about the
> Monty Python references not being a particular _strength_ in
> promoting Python. 

Sorry if I was ranting but here is some more rant:

People have very real reason to fear MPFC: Highly educated/wealthy family background/private
school/Oxford/Cambridge people jumping about and acting 'zany' and coming up
with all sorts of useless sketches designed to appeal strictly to the liberal-elite
is a fairly repulsive artistic concept especially if you do not find the style
of MPFC even remotely amusing.

Unfortunately this formula (hiring these sorts of people) was to become the
bed rock of BBC alternative comedy for years to come (Ben Elton, Steven Fry
etc etc) and remember people in the UK did not have the choice about this crap
as it came out of their licence fee (that is another subject)

So anyway I don't see quite those sorts of concepts woven into PHP, Perl,C,C++,
Java or anything else....although there may well be similar things but *well*
hidden as they should be

If someone came up with a KKK language it might be attractive for members of
the KKK but would generally be consideredly highly unacceptable and would attract
much criticism. If someone came up with a language/interpreter based on their
favourite TV show like I dunno 'Friends' or whatever it would be seen as ridiculous.
If I came up with a scripting language called 'Ben Elton' then that would have
extreme political overtones and just invoke all Ben Eltons extreme left wing
radicalism.

At the least MPFC is divisive (you either find it funny or you don't)

Surely the uptake and use of a particular language (to solve a particular niche
or set of problems) is at least in part due to the perceived politcal and artist
*neutrality* of that language.

If the author and contributors to Python wish to only encourage Python use
on the basis that the end user has great admiration of MPFC (as amusingly hinted
at by one of the other authors in this thread) you should perhaps restrict
access to python.org and related sites and authenticate on that basis and call
it a private members club....

Cuddly cartoon characters like the Snake, or various BSD creatures = highly
acceptable and good.

MPFC = too aristically/politically/socially 'loaded' to be acceptable.

Please drag the Python and python.org image out of the stuffy past and in line
with similar projects

regards