Top-posting &c. (was Re: [ANNC] pybotwar-0.8)

[rusi]

On Aug 18, 8:34 pm, Grant Edwards <inva... at invalid.invalid> wrote:
> On 2012-08-17, rusi <rustompm... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I was in a corporate environment for a while.  And carried my
> > 'trim&interleave' habits there. And got gently scolded for seeming to
> > hide things!!
>
> I have, rarely, gotten the opposite raction from "corporate e-mailers"
> used to top posting.  I got one comment something like "That's cool
> how you interleaved your reponses -- it's like having a real
> conversation."

Well sure. If I could civilize people around me, God (or Darwin?)
would give me a medal.
Usually though, I find it expedient to remember G.B. Shaw's:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one
persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends
on the unreasonable man."

and then decide exactly how (un)reasonable to be in a given context.

[No claims to always succeed in these calibrations :-) ]
And which brings me back to the question of how best to tell new folk
about the netiquette around here.

I was once teaching C to a batch of first year students.  I was
younger then and being more passionate and less reasonable, I made a
rule that students should indent their programs correctly.
[Nothing like python in sight those days!]

A few days later there was a commotion.  Students appeared in class
with black-badges, complained to the head-of-department and what not.
Very perplexed I said: "Why?! I allowed you to indent in any which way
you like as long as you have some rules and follow them." I imagined
that I had been perfectly reasonable and lenient!

Only later did I realize that students did not understand
- how to indent
- why to indent
- what program structure meant

So when people top-post it seems reasonable to assume that they dont
know better before jumping to conclusions of carelessness, rudeness,
inattention etc.

For example, my sister recently saw some of my mails and was mystified
that I had sent back 'blank mails' until I explained and pointed out
that my answers were interleaved into what was originally sent!
Clearly she had only ever seen (and therefore expected) top-posted
mail-threads.  Like your 'corporate-emailer' she found it damn neat,
after the initiation.

Whether such simple unfamiliarity with culture is the case in the
particular case (this thread's discussion) I am not sure.  Good to
remember Hanlon's razor...