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Comment by BlackFingolfin | Hacker News Reader

Your post quite strongly alludes to it being either due to incompetence, or politics, or both. So I think grandparent has a very valid point, and you might want to change the tone of your post a bit; then it'll produce fewer knee-jerk reactions, and might be taken more seriously.

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Nah, just people connecting that sentiment with other statements. It should be cleared up since it's causing some mass confusion.

It's funny because I preface it by saying "Remember that it's a matter of opinion" (and, well, the title alone) and people come out of the woodwork completely disregarding this, or outright misinterpreting sections of it.

I maintain that a large reader base here does not actually... read.

> I maintain that a large reader base here does not actually... read.

I would disagree.

Although there's often a fair number of commenters who clearly read the title of an article, and then just start commenting on that, in this case we can see that people have read (at a minimum) your opening statement and whichever list item they're taking issue with.

I believe that if a large set of people are misinterpreting what I've written, it's a sign that I probably wrote it poorly. Not in the sense of arguing for the wrong thing, but in the sense that I'm not conveying my argument well enough. This is easy to do, because when I'm writing something, I know what I mean. This sounds obvious, but it's hard to read what I've written tabula rasa, without bringing that "of course I mean X" view to it.

So, the feedback you're getting here is that your opening statement colors the rest of your piece. That "Incompetence? Politics? Both?" aside obviously makes a large subset of readers assume that you're saying "all of these complaints in my list must be unaddressed due to incompetence or politics". That's at odds with the later "just an opinion" statement, and people are sticking with the more-inflammatory initial claim.

I'm pretty sure everybody here can read. We are asserting that your sentence:

"These are obvious flaws in design, in my opinion, that warrant re-looking at, but to which no real improvements are being made for some reason. (Incompetence? Politics? Both? Who knows.)"

sets a very negative tone and makes your "list of problems" look like a "list of complaints that these incompetent losers should fix asap". In my opinion you may just not be the best writer for some reason (Lack of education? Incompetence? Both? Who knows).

>In my opinion you may just not be the best writer for some reason (Lack of education? Incompetence? Both? Who knows).

Then right back at you -- that triggers the same problems as the original statement. :D

You could very well have stated your point more constructively with that.

That was exactly my point. I'm glad at least you have some reading compression skills :).

Makes me think of something I read about cultural divides. Some cultures think that a speaker can say whatever they feel like, and it's the listener's obligation to figure out how to understand it. Others think that it's the speaker's obligation to structure and phrase things in a way that make it clear to the listener what they meant.

Not looking to make value judgements of whether one is generally better, but I think it's clear that when writing on the internet for general audiences, the second way is more effective in spreading your point.

I've read your piece, and unfortunately the overall tone sounds like a rant. I'm sure it wasn't your intent, but tone is hard to convey in a purely textual medium sometimes. I fall victim to this often, and have been actively working to try to avoid excessively negative tone (even if I feel that way).

The ranty tone of the piece obscures the rest of the points you were trying to make - many are good, but a strong tone will immediately put people on the defensive rather than trying to open up and understand what's being said.

Yes, I'm seeing now that the tone of the post is more talked about than the actual contents. Learning!

tyleraldrich wrote to you, to demonstrate you that it's more than a "tone":

"In my opinion you may just not be the best writer for some reason (Lack of education? Incompetence? Both? Who knows)."

Do you consider it to be "just the tone of the post" directed to you?

Stating that something is a matter of opinion does not mean that insults do not hurt. Either you don't want people to listen to you so you don't have to worry about what you say or you do want people to listen in which case how you phrase things matters.

Or put another way: I'm a core developer of Python and I found your post somewhat insulting (I've unfortunately seen worse). You claim I'm possibly incompetent and I did a half-assed job with asyncio. You very "audibly" sigh and call my work "nonsense". You ask me to "come on" and accept your view on things when I have apparently helped make a "gimped language". And you end by saying I need to "fix [my] language". None of that phrasing comes off as understanding of the hard work and immeasurable number of hours I have put into making sure Python continues to function well for you over the past 14 years that I have been a core developer. I know you like Python as you stated in the post and in the comments here, but that doesn't wash away the rest of the unnecessary negativity in your post such that I want to take your opinions seriously enough to spend the time to explain why things are the way they are.

Hey, Brett. Thanks for your work :-)

Fair enough, I never intended it to be posted to HN or receive this much attention or I'd have taken much more care with the tone.

I retract the "ignorance" sentiment, as I do not actually know what Python developers are considering.

I do apologize for that, and thank you for your contributions. It is still by far one of my favorite languages, and I use it daily. :)

More commenters here, including me, tried to explain you that even before Brett chimed in. It shouldn't be even necessary that somebody like he does that. Just imagine how many users there are in the world, imagine the burden of the people who invest their energy in maintaining that huge project. It's the users and all the already written programs that make it huge, not the code base alone.

> I do apologize for that

Maybe making your apology visible on your blog too?

The thing is, by saying that your incompetence/politics remark is just an opinion, and by not going out of your way to offer a factual justification, you have made it clear that it is essentially an information-free statement, while its snide disparagement of people who have put a lot of effort into Python lingers undiminished, if not actually emphasized as such by its lack of information. Then you double-down by taking on all the people who see that this is so. As a consequence, the currently-top issue in the comments is this, and not whatever it is you think someone should be doing to improve Python.

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