To Troll or Not To Troll

[Chris Mellon]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Warren DeLano <warren at delsci.com> wrote:
>> Yet Another Python Troll (the ivory tower reference, as well as the
>> abrupt shift from complaining about keywords to multiprocessing), I
>> have to point out that Python does add new keywords, it has done so in
>> the past, and there was a considerable amount of warning, including an
>> automated deprecation warning in the very version you are going to
>> recommend to your "customers' (I don't actually think you have any
>> customers).
>
> ROFL!  I'm sorry, you're right -- this has all been a figment of my
> imagination...
>
> http://www.pymolwiki.org/index.php/Covers
>
> http://images.google.com/images?q=pymol
>
> So don't mind me -- I clearly don't know what I'm talking about.
>

Peculiarities in usenet resulted in this discussion having several
threads and I missed some messages before I wrote this email. So I
apologize for calling you a troll, but only slightly - what you wrote
had exactly the same content and tone that people who are
intentionally trolling write every day. There are legitimate,
interesting, and important discussions to be had about multithreading
in Python, but nothing you wrote was of any use to any of them.


I still would have to call your management of the problem considerably
into question - your expertise at writing mathematical software may
not be in question, but your skills and producing and managing a
software product are. You have nobody at your organization, which
sells a product that relies on Python, who follows python-dev? Or who
even reads the changelogs for new python versions? You should have
known about the "as" keyword change *over a year ago*, even if the
import bug was masking the deprecation warning. Everything else aside,
I can't get past that issue with your complaints. I *have* gone back
now and read all the posts in all the threads and I still have not
seen a single post from you even hinting that you might have any
responsibility in the matter.

Multithreading is a different discussion, and totally unrelated to the
original complaint (which is why it's trolling, customers or not, to
bring it up in this thread) and I'm not going to address it -
everything of any interest in the conversation has been said already,
and if you know enough to talk seriously about it you already know all
the arguments on both sides. If you *don't* know them, a perusal of
the python-dev and c.l.p archives should bring you up to speed easily.