Formal Question to Steering Council (re recent PEP8 changes)

[Mats Wichmann]

On 7/2/20 12:04 PM, Rhodri James wrote:
> On 02/07/2020 18:11, Dieter Maurer wrote:
>> I am no member of the Council. Thus, your questions are not directed
>> to me. **BUT** you made your questions public and thus you are
>> likely prepared to receive public comments.
> 
> Fortunately you don't answer any of the questions, so I don't need to
> have an opinion on that :-)
> 
>> The commit message tries to provide the motivation for
>> the change. In my view, it is good to document change motivations
>> and a commit message is not a bad place for that.
> 
> True.  However, the motivation as appeared in the discussions was
> (approximately) that many people, especially those whose first language
> is not English, find being given a list of writing guidelines like
> Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" intimidating.  That's fair
> enough, though a bit more consideration suggests that many people have
> exactly the opposite problem.  The wording could be amended to reassure
> both, and I've been contemplating doing so.

Indeed, without weighing in on this case itself, the purpose of calling
out a "standard langauge" for formal documents is to remove sources of
ambiguity, not to promote one viewpoint or another: not sure how to
express something? Let's see if  the style manual has anything to guide
me. Not to intimidate someone about having set an impossible bar for
writing.  So if there's a way to express that, I'm sure everybody would
be happier!