Teaching python to non-programmers

[Ian Kelly]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2014 at 11:11 PM, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 2:37 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Right. Its true that when I was at a fairly large corporate, I was not told:
>> "Please always top post!"
>>
>> What I was very gently and super politely told was:
>> "Please dont delete mail context"
>
> Then you were told that by someone who does not understand email.
> That's equivalent to being told "Don't ever delete any of your code,
> just comment it out". I don't care who's saying that, it's bad advice.

That depends on what the mail is being used for.  For instance there's
a difference between mail-as-dialogue and mail-as-business-process.
In the former it is normal, even polite, to prune as the topic evolves
and past quotations become less relevant.  In the latter it seems more
common for the entire thread to be preserved as a sort of "chain of
custody" -- this way the next person who needs to see the email thread
has full context as to what needs to happen and where the request is
coming from.

I'm generally in the habit of not pruning work-related emails even
when they are more of the dialogue type, because these tend to be very
tightly focused, and so that if a new person needs to be brought into
the conversation they will have the full context of what we're talking
about and why we're talking about it.