It also reminds me of the switch to the metric system. The reason Americans are adverse to it is that it was taught in school in the 1970s as a bunch of obscure conversion functions. A meter is 39 inches. A kilometer is 5/6 of a mile. A centimeter is tiny compared to an inch; look at a ruler. A liter is a bit more than a quart. To convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius, divide by 2 and add 32. People's math homework was all these tedious conversions.
But that's not how people in metric countries use the metric system. They just move the decimal point left and right and change the unit. They follow metric recipes. They compare 500 milliliters to 1 liter. They have an intuitive feeling of how warm 20 degrees Celsius is, and how warm 30 degrees Celsius is. The only time they use the tedious conversions is when they have to compare it to something in English units, which is rare. Even Americans, if they start in metric such as the secondary number on a food can, or the other side of the ruler, or their speedometer when they're in Canada, can easily compare it to other metric units and remain in metric for the entire situation. And they do sometimes use millimeters rather than inches because it's a conveniently short unit for short or precise things. So it's like going from Python 2 to 3. Converting programs is hard, but after that it's easy, and you get access to more features (analogous to just moving the decimal point left and right, or having freezing and boiling at 0 and 100). Once you are in 3, you rarely have to deal with 2, unless you encounter an old program or library. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" 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]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pylons-discuss/CAH9f%3Dura5LPgW9Xp9MM_UzT8G6pZqQyEohk7P%2B28wwcEtRUJ4Q%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
