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Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 15:11:26 +1000
Subject: Re: Teaching python to non-programmers
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
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On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 2:37 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompmody@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.

> Now when a mail goes round between 5 persons and what is addressed at one point
> is not the immediate previous mail, bottom-posting without pruning is as
> meaningless as top posting.

Yep. So you bottom-post *and prune*, because that is how email needs
to be. You do not need to repeatedly send copies of the whole thread
everywhere.

> What is unhelpful is
> - to suggest that my norms are universal norms. IOW there is a fundamental
>   difference between natural and human-made laws
> - to lose track of statistics, in this case the population-densities of USENET
>   vs other internet-kiddie cultures

Also unhelpful is to suggest that norms should, simply *because* they
are the prevailing practice, be maintained. Even if everyone else on
python-list top-posted, I would still bottom-post and trim. "Normal"
is not a justification.

ChrisA