python vs c#

[Alex Martelli]

Ann <Anna at nospam.invalid> wrote:

> > Anna (pedants-r-us) Martelli
> 
> Anna,
> Just wondering, which one are you:
> ped·ant (pèd'nt) noun
> 1. One who pays undue attention to book learning and formal rules.
> 2. One who exhibits one's learning or scholarship ostentatiously.
> 3. Obsolete. A schoolmaster.

I think Merriam-Webster for once captures a nuance better than American
Heritage (with definition 2c, "a formalist or precisionist in
teaching").  The "undue" connotation, while popular, is not universal.
More interestingly, one might infer a desire to recapture for positive
self-identification a word that has acquired negative connotations in
popular use.  Perhaps the best-known such fight currently going on is
for the word "hacker", but, after all, such _is_ the history of quite a
few other words... consider "gothic" and "baroque"...


Alex