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Re: [sc-users] Re: string formatting notation



> > Because of the nature of SC and its user base, I think members of the
> > developer community ... sometimes make poor model users.
>
> This comment bears repeating. (It's similar to the way that programmers are
> often the last people you want to write documentation.)

I am often the one pushing for documentation of style guidelines, newly added methods, and community policies. Today I thoroughly reviewed such a PR, and have several in-progress docs on the wiki. I cleanly document my PRs and issues so that others can join in easily. I make a great effort to write and maintain straightforward and helpful documentation. It is very hard not to take this as directed at me when the last 20 messages have just been myself, James, and Scott.

I am very familiar with the concept under discussion. Based on this discussion, neither of you are very familiar with it. Recognize that this has a significant impact on how you will judge its uses and misuses. We all have something to give here. It would be very easy for me to say, "You are a teacher, and that makes you focus too much on how easy it is to teach something to a beginning programmer." I have said no such thing. If you could start viewing my experience as a strength, rather than as something to be mistrusted, I think we'd get along better.

It seems like a lot of your thoughts here stem from what has happened in the past on this project. While anecdotal evidence can be helpful in many situations, I can't help but feel that it's also produced a stereotype that I now have to fight against. For instance, although I wrote several messages ago:

> I've argued strongly for this idea because I wanted it to get a fair hearing, not because I'm interesting in making things easier for myself.

Scott still wrote in his last message:

> Also, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing wrong at all with wanting to contribute something because it would be personally useful! Many, probably most, contributors start from this.

Who is this comment meant for? Again, it very much seems like this statement is meant to apply to me.

This comment just makes me sad, really. I don't know what to do to convince you that my judgment as a "poor model user" has value.

-Brian

On Mon, Dec 25, 2017 at 8:24 PM, <jamshark70@xxxxxx> wrote:
i wrote
> Because of the nature of SC and its user base, I think members of the
> developer community ... sometimes make poor model users.

This comment bears repeating. (It's similar to the way that programmers are
often the last people you want to write documentation.)

Whether we want to admit it or not, at the end of the day, it *is* about
personal preference. IMO it's vague to say "I want to make the language
better." If an alternative to format() makes the language better, then it
pretty much reduces to some combination of:

- format() has technical deficiencies that are addressed by the alternative,

- or, I/you/she/he/whoever doesn't like it (finds it ugly in some way).

So far, *one* solid technical deficiency has been pointed out -- it's too
easy for the argument list to get out of sync with the '%' markers.

From where I sit, technically, it's pretty much a wash: interpolated strings
become unreadable when the embedded expressions get too long, and format()
gets harder to control when you have more than, oh, three or four arguments.

So then it comes down to taste, maintainability, and teachability.

hjh



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