META Culture of this place [was Re: for / while else doesn't make sense]

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, 24 May 2016 12:19 pm, Ned Batchelder wrote:

> Ugh, can we please stop with the "well, actually" pedantic tangents?

With respect, no.

This is a forum with a very tolerant approach to off-topic and only-
slightly-on-topic discussions. If you want a forum that follows strict rules
for what's allowed and what's not, you're in the wrong place. There are
plenty of such forums available: Stackoverflow, /r/python, #python,
Python-Dev, etc, all with their own idiosyncrasies. This is ours: we have a
bunch of people here who enjoy extended discussions on computing matters
which are sometimes only tangentially related to Python.

And why shouldn't we? We're all volunteers here, including the regulars, and
if it ceases to be fun for us, we'll leave. Some of us *like* those
discussions about the minutia of Unicode, ancient computing platforms,
floating point arithmetic, etc. Sometimes we even learn something.

I'm sorry that you personally don't appreciate these long threads. Maybe you
can mute them in your mail/news editor. Guido often does that on
Python-Ideas. Or just hit delete on posts that don't interest you.

Or perhaps this place simply isn't a good fit for you, just like #python
isn't a good fit for me. I'm not trying to push you away, I really aren't,
and if you decide to leave I will miss your contributions, but this is not
just a forum for Q&A. It's also a forum for (often spirited) discussions
and strongly-held opinions.


-- 
Steven