Hi Guillaume, and I'm very glad to see that you've taken my reply in the positive, helpful spirit it was meant in -- I'm Italian, with a touch of French, and find our Latin cultural openness and frankness sometimes grate in the globalized culture of the tech world... happy it didn't here!
On Sat, Mar 4, 2017 at 12:20 PM, Guillaume France <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Alex, > > *First I apologize for the italic, that wasn't mature. But your reaction > was super: I warmly thank you for that!* > > Being unable to move my hands to qualify what I'm saying (a pronounced cultural trait in Italy but far from unknown in France) often makes me tempted to use italic and/or bold, too, so, full sympathy!-) > I also thank you for the quality of your answer. Especially for pointing > me to the right forum (I'm both impressed and sorry. Impressed you did not > send me to the right forum right away, it says a lot about you. I'm also > sorry to have wasted your time). > No problem, and I do appreciate your concern. The subtlety of the email package (sometimes a tad too subtle for its own good, and I say that with a slightly apologetic tone as a core Python committer, even though I didn't contribute to that standard library package in particular... not helping out with it makes me 1% guilty since I *could* have helped design or at least document it better!-) is worth exploring and understanding better. > > Regarding the Google group: I did the "brief search" you are talking about > to try to find the right Gmail api forum, I just typed "Gmail api" and this > group was the most accurate group name. The other result > <https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/support> asked me to post > downvoted question on Stack. > > The Google-appengine name surprised me, but since I usually find Google > documentation obscure, coming from Google an obscure name sounds logical > (it's even more obscure since the right group did not even come as the > first result). > I have to sympathize with you on this point -- yes, our docs (and in particular, product naming) could definitely be better, overall; sorry:-(. > > > Concerning Stack, I have a completely different experience, or I would say > you have a completely different perception than all the stack users I know. > Your explanation is interesting: > > My reputation score there is over half a million, so I must not have lost >> too many points by asking inappropriate questions -- which suggests to me >> that I do know which questions are or are not appropriate there. >> > > But I have an even simpler explanation : Your question are not down-voted > because the questions you ask aren't basic. > Perhaps. In retrospect the few Qs I've asked do appear rather basic to me in retrospect (based on what I know now vs what little I knew when I asked) -- how to use EXPLAIN to predict query performance on MySQL (asked back when I understood MySQL 1/10th as much as I did PostgreSQL -- 8 years later, the proportion may be reversed:-), etc. But Qs don't get downvoted for being basic; basic Qs are just as OK as advanced ones. That's the theory, and that's my perception of Stackoverflow. Since most Qs are basic, how could SO have become so popular if basic Qs were discouraged?! > Basic users struggle in Stack, because they are looking for basic > information, the one that seem so obvious to people like you (it's not > judgmental, on the contrary) that nobody asks them. Asking these basic > questions aren't welcome on Stack (at all) because they look stupid, or > lacking a research investment. (It also applies to the "a brief search > suggests". My brief search suggested this Google-appengine group). Many > stack people don't really get that some stack users aren't all programmers. > I understand that stack hasn't been made for the basic users, I accept it > and I'm glad to have it, but I have a completely different opinion than > yours. ((It's fascinating how people could have different way to look at > the same reality.)) > Definitely! I'm a programmer -- ended up becoming one, after starting out as a designer of integrated circuits with hardly any software learning (just one mandatory course on Fortran!-) because that's where the best jobs were, and I found I could mostly self-teach myself the software side of the force (and exploit the willingness to help me on the part of many experienced programmers... lots of what I've been doing since is "pay forward" the huge amounts of help I was given and can never "pay back"!-). Interestingly, my wife Anna *isn't* a programmer -- she's a psychologist with a degree from Stanford -- yet she was the first woman Fellow of the Python Software Foundation, the first woman winner of the Frank Willison award for contributions to Python, and co-author with me of two O'Reilly books on Python (2nd ed of the Python Cookbook, and now, 3rd ed of Python in a Nutshell, due out in about a month but you can buy the Early Release edition right now and get the final version when ready:-). Our (red) Prius's license plate is P♥︎THON, partly because it's on Python mailing lists we originally met... eventually leading to our falling in love and marrying, whence the heart-for-love (also looks a bit like a Y:-). So our perceptions of things sometimes differ (which I think is part of makes us so good at co-authoring books -- complementary visions of an issue plus the ability to talk it out lovingly and come to a helpful consensus)... > > "Sharing to help other users", not in response to specific technical >> questions, is not within this remit > > > Ok, but that's a kind of answers that are very, very precious for basic > users (because they seems too obvious that nobody talks about it). > Very, but, alas, not suitable for Stack Overflow. Maybe the new "documentation" section -- still not familiar with it but seems different enough to be worth exploring in that vein. > > I just finish by warmly thanking you for the million people you have > helped, that's really something to be proud of ―more of anything. I also > thank you for *the kindness of your message.* > > I wish you the best, and greeting from the other stack universe: the wild > west stack of the basic user! > > (*You would have guess that the stack users I know aren't programmers > either!) > Plenty of people aren't programmers but need to do some programming anyway to get their jobs done -- Anna got started hacking (originally in Visual Basic, then sensibly decided to get a better language) because IT's scheduling of her "I need this to get my job done" requests was measured in years, yet she KNEW (correctly) it could be done in weeks even by a non-programmer (would have been days for a programmer). If Stack Overflow is mistreating this huge audience, they need to be made aware of this -- perhaps on `meta` -- and start mending their ways! Thanks for your constructive and friendly response, Alex > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Google App Engine" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. > To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/ > msgid/google-appengine/afa7d415-2146-4650-a0fa- > 5618b7665cd5%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/afa7d415-2146-4650-a0fa-5618b7665cd5%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/CAE46Be8R2eV%3DHUX%2B-BeJExnVGBrV42dWbvmOghmeyXKQaq5K7A%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
