I was reading Roger Johansson’s blog and came to a post about message quoting. It reminded me of something I wrote last time I observed a flamewar between top-posting and inline-replies proponents. This is a rough translation from Slovene:

> Because it messes up the flow of reading.
> > Why is replying about quotations annoying?

Could you please stop with that? I don’t mean just the author of this message, but the general attitude of forcing people to use one, true way of quoting.

Both approaches, a reply under a short quotation or a whole message about the previous one, have their place and choice should be based on current need. So it’s good to be aware of their consequences on resulting dialog.

Short quotations followed by replies are meaningful when lost context from clipped text doesn’t hurt understanding too much. This means they are useful mainly for short, fact-oriented answers to concrete questions.

They are more or less inappropriate for longer, more involved dialog because they transfer focus from whole text to particular sentences. Lost context just raises probability of misunderstanding.

Endless threads, quarreling about insignificant issues, off-topic threads etc. are a normal and expected byproduct of such discussion. Even a cursory glance over archives proves this.

It’s much better for a dialog, if reply is placed above the message, but ONLY when it’s self-contained and meaningful even without the original message. Attached original is therefore at most a friendly reminder for forgetful minds.

Picking right form is a matter of personal judgment and hence a source of mistakes. But this certainly can’t be a reason to howl down somebody.

I still believe this is true. I find myself using inline replies more often than not, but I do use top-posting when occasions calls for it and I don’t think I’m a lesser being for it.

Until recently I’ve been using Python 2.3.x almost exclusively and I thought it was about time I get more familiar with what 2.4 series has to offer. I’ve skimmed the list of new features when point zero version came out and found some things that I like (e.g sets) and some that I disliked (e.g. decorators).

So, this time I invested a bit more time to actually read and understand what was on offer and how these features came about. I still haven’t found a need or a sympathy for decorators, although I can see why some people want them. Personally, I believe they’ll more likely be a cause for less readable and harder to understand Python code than they prove to be useful.

I still think Python is a wonderful language, but gone are the days when I was looking forward to each release and goodness it brought. These days I’m afraid to look and discover another feature that helps more with keeping habits from other languages than adding something new and genuinely useful.

I like minimalism in all things and therefore see every new feature as a burden that should be more than offset by its usefulness. I’m not a language designer and hence can’t really say or tell if Python is going down the wrong track, but there is something that I find most annoying.

I’ve been thinking about languages quite a lot recently; how we use and abuse them and what impact our language proficiency has on our communications. There’s one thing I find very different with programming languages than those used for normal human interaction.

There’s very little optional about them.

It really gets my goat when a language feature is defended as being optional. You may have a choice in using a feature, but you certainly don’t get a choice in learning and understanding its use. Even if you don’t use it yourself, you’ll quite likely have to interact with somebody else’s code, which does and unlike with English, it’s not enough to just get a sense of meaning from its context. You actually have to really understand what it does and hence need to be familiar with feature itself.

It might still be worthwhile to add it, but let’s not pretend when we do that it’s completely optional.

P.S: Isn’t it amazing that after all these years, we still have a global interpreter lock? Wouldn’t it be better if we worked on removing that disgrace?

I thought Harold Evans’ last column was quite good.

It’s no shocking revelation that I’m not a native English speaker. In fact, my mother tongue is Slovenian; a fairly difficult language to master even for willing. Although my (mis)use of it leaves much to be desired, I’d like to think I have a better grasp of it than of English.

Still, every now and then I happen to get into trouble because of a misunderstanding that is sometimes caused by as little as a subtly different perception of a word. Usually such problems can be easily spotted and rectified since nuances are much clearer to me in a language I’ve used for more than three decades.

However, I was less lucky when dealing with different cultures using English. One such occasion was using word hate improperly, as you might use it in Slovenian by implying a stronger disliking of something, but not an actual hate. I try not to transplant use of a word or a phrase between languages, but I’m sure I still make mistakes like this.

I also lost international friendships through years. Most of them probably because of my cultural ignorance and sometimes it seems the language we used came between us. I came to believe there’s a risk in knowing language well enough for people to assume you know what you’re talking about and not well enough to actually do.

So, does anybody have any personal language related horror stories to share?