Teaching python to non-programmers

Thu Apr 10 18:40:22 EDT 2014

On 2014年4月10日 21:52:53 +0100, <pete.bee.emm at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Just awesome, not only do we have double line spacing and single line
>>>> paragraphs, we've also got top posting, oh boy am I a happy bunny :)
>>>> I'll leave someone3 else to explain, I just can't be bothered.
>>>>>> Do you get paid to be a jerk, or is it just for yuks? If the latter, 
> you're not funny.

It's called irony, and unfortunately Mark is reacting to an all-to-common 
situation that GoogleGroups foists on unsuspecting posters like yourself. 
It's the result of a fundamental clash of technological cultures; trying 
to impose a pretty web interface on a protocol defined to use unformatted 
plain text. It fails, inevitably, leaving us Usenet and 
mailing-list-based readers annoyed at being given something unreadable to 
deal with. Unsurprisingly, most of us don't bother, and won't have read 
more than the first couple of words of your original post.
The wiki page https://wiki.python.org/moin/GoogleGroupsPython goes into 
some detail of what the rest of us find annoying, and how to fix the 
problems. I've left the double-spacing that you quoting Mark produced so 
you can see that part of the problem -- if you want to understand why it 
is so hated, imagine that done to a screenful of Python script, then 
quoted by a few more people on GG, until you're only getting half a dozen 
lines of code (or text) on the screen. That sort of thing is hard work to 
read, and not many bother, and yes, it really does happen.
Top posting is generally poor netiquette, thank you for not doing it this 
time. Unfortunately you fell into another trap GG lays for you by not 
handling attributions properly. Or at all this time. I happen to 
remember that you were replying to Mark Lawrence (just in case it was 
impossible for me to guess from the subject matter :-), but if I hadn't 
remembered that, I wouldn't have known from the context without going and 
searching. Again, that's work many people won't bother putting in, making 
your post less likely to be read.
Sorry your post was the straw to break the camel's back this week, but it 
is a complete pain to the rest of us. I have more than once considered 
getting my reader to automatically discard anything with 
"@googlegroups.com" in the message ID just to reduce the aggravation.
-- 
Rhodri James *-* Wildebeest Herder to the Masses