On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 3:03 PM, <ru...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Regarding esr's "smart-questions", although I acknowledge > it has useful advice, I have always found it elitist and > abrasive. I wish someone would rewrite it without the > "we are gods" attitude.
I find it actually pretty appropriate. The attitude comes from a hierarchy in which we are not at the top - but neither is esr. On the roleplaying game Threshold, there's a help file about that, which succinctly sums up what I'm trying to say, but it doesn't seem to be on the web, so unless you want to telnet to thresholdrpg.com, create an account, and type "help hierarchy" at the prompt, you can't see the text of it. Oh well. :| Anyway, point is: We're in a hierarchy (or actually several independent and unrelated ones), and being at the top means (in the open source world) being everyone's servant; and the people at the top simply don't have time to be _everyone's_ servant personally, so they need some sous-servants to help them to help people. (Obvious example of that in the Python community is Guido at the top, other core committers and PEP writers and so on helping him, and then the large crew of core question-answerers, bug triagers, patch writers, etc, etc, etc.) You offer courtesy to those who are above you; they're giving of their time freely, making themselves your servants, and all they ask is that you make it easy for them to do so. That's a pretty good deal for all of us at the bottom of the hierarchy :) ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
