Teaching python to non-programmers

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2014 21:37:22 -0700, Rustom Mody wrote:

> Right. Its true that when I was at a fairly large corporate, I was not
> told: "Please always top post!"

That's only because they are ignorant of the terminology of top- bottom- 
and interleaved posting. If they knew the term, they would say it.


> What I was very gently and super politely told was: "Please dont delete
> mail context"

And your answer was, "I'm not. All the context required to establish 
meaning is there." Correct?

Or perhaps you said, "When you send a letter via paper mail, replying to 
someone's enquiry, do you photocopy their letter and staple it to the 
back of your response? And when they reply, to they photocopy YOUR 
response, *including the photocopy of their letter*, and sent it back? Of 
course you don't. That would be *idiotic*. It's no less idiotic when the 
effort of photocopying the letter is reduced to hitting Reply in Outlook."

Standard business handling of email truly is foolish. People only get 
away with it because, for the most part, *they stop reading* as soon as 
they hit the end of the top-posted reply (and their reading comprehension 
of that is generally lousy, but that's another story) and don't even 
notice that there are 15 pages of quoted-quoted-quoted-quoted-quoted-
quoted copies of their own words attached, complete with 10 copies of 
their (legally meaningless) disclaimer.

All this redundancy does nothing for improved communication, and it has 
real costs: emails are bigger than they need be, searching archives for 
information is harder, and if you're ever involved in a legal dispute, 
instead of paying your lawyer to review six pages of correspondence 
you're paying her to review sixty pages with the same semantic content. 
Top-posting is a classic example of the victory of short term gain 
(immediately save two seconds and a microscopic amount of effort when 
replying to an email) versus long term cost.


> Now when a mail goes round between 5 persons and what is addressed at
> one point is not the immediate previous mail, bottom-posting without
> pruning is as meaningless as top posting.

Ha. In my experience, anything not addressed immediately in corporate 
email is *never addressed again*, not until the original poster starts a 
new email to try to get an answer.


> As in religion or any cultural matter, its fine to stand up for and even
> vociferously uphold one's 'own' whatever that may be.
> 
> What is unhelpful is
> - to suggest that my norms are universal norms. IOW there is a
> fundamental difference between natural and human-made laws
> - to lose track of statistics, in this case the population-densities of
> USENET vs other internet-kiddie cultures


I don't know that there is anyone here that thinks interleaved posting is 
the norm among the majority of email users. Nor is anyone saying that 
Usenet posters make up a majority of internet users. What we are saying 
is that *interleaved posting is objectively better* for most forms of 
email or news communication (although it is not a panacea), and 
especially for *technical discussions* like those that occur here.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano
http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/