[Tutor] Response to responses about list of lists: a meta exercise in mailinglist recursion

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2010 11:53:38 pm Siren Saren wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano,
>
> Your response was profoundly helpful to me.
[...]

Thank you for the kind words, and cheers! I wish you good fortunate and 
a lot of fun in your endeavour.

> I thought something in the culture of programming was particularly
> intolerant of the sort of errors I'd make, perhaps because of the
> syntactic precision required to program well.

Programmers, especially *mediocre* programmers, are often well known for 
their arrogance and rudeness. Sometimes this arrogance is justified; 
often it is not.

Remember also that, sadly, the Internet encourages rudeness. You can 
easily fire off an instant response without thinking about the 
consequences; there is anonymity and the urge to show off; there is the 
urge to win the argument no matter what. I admit that sometimes I fall 
into this trap myself. If I've had a bad day at work, or have had to 
put up with one too many annoyance, sometimes I might be a bit 
short-tempered. I would like to hope only at those who deserve it, but 
I'm only human.

But fortunately, the Python community is usually much, much friendlier 
than some other places. Perhaps that's because Python is a programming 
language designed to be usable by people of all levels, from beginners 
and children to programming geniuses. With a willingness to learn and a 
little bit of care, I am sure you will be fine.

You might like to read this:

http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Take it with a grain of salt -- not every smart programmer or hacker is 
as anti-social as described, but nevertheless, the basic principles are 
sound.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano