From: Marc Heiler <shevegen@...>
Date: 2009-06-04T01:30:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Pythonic indentation (or: beating a dead horse)

> there are discussion topics which have been done to
> death in the past and that when they recur the posters 
> responsible will get short shrift.

I do disagree with your opinion about this.

There is no "hive opinion". Everyone is an individual.

Some may have this opinion, some may have another opinion.

What you deem "have been done to death in the past" someone
else may regard as a topic that is not finished at all. Why
would they then follow your point of view about this?

I find it prematurely to stifle discussion just because someone
disagrees with something.

> It's also incredibly rude for someone to make their first post to 
> a mailing list with something along the lines of "I'm new to this 
> and think it's really cool, but you're all dumb because...

I do not think it is "incredibly rude".

Quite the opposite - I believe a healthy community must be able to
attract newbies just as easily, without an arrogant bossy tone to
deem what is rude and what is not. Ideas should be kept in free
flow rather than locked down.

The message is there, it is pointless to use argumentum ad hominem
against someone else just because someone gets mad over written
text.

Let's concentrate on the subject at hand without attacking whoever
voiced a specific opinion. People who do insult others aren't
likely to convince anyone whatsoever anyway. And this subject
seems to alienate people much more readily, in that they say
"i hate this idea", and then defend that point of view, rather
than judging from a neutral POINT of view.

And please:

> In the case of the Ruby community the main hunger
> seems to be for ever-more-powerful meta-programming techniques and
> extension of the higher order functionals that so much of our code
> comprises of.

This speculation should not be done about a whole "community".

Every community consists of individuals, even if they have a very
similar opinion about something, they still may have different
point of views or arguments as to how they reached that point.

It isn't good to unite all point of views into "logical groups".

For example:
So many people equate the Ruby on Rails community with the Ruby
community - but in my experience these two do not largely overlap.
It is simply unfair to attempt to equate different opinions into
one pool. What does "meta-programming" NEED to have to do anything
with indent at all?

Last but not least, the ultimate freedom would be to have the ability
to omit end as an optional feature in ruby available with a default
being the way it currently is.

To switch between indents, one could use #comment marks, like it is
done for the Encoding stuff already (or for vim files etc...)

Enforcement about official ruby stdlib could still follow one specific
guideline - i.e. it must be properly documented and tested, and it must
use "official" useage of end. (This would be an enforcement of a policy,
rather than syntax.)
-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.