On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 5:39 AM, <suam...@gmail.com> wrote: > When presented with options, these are the possible stances: > > 1. (Lead) Become educated on the options and decide on one. > 2. (Follow) Become educated on the options and remain impartial. > 3. Remain ignorant of the similarities/differences and decide on one. > 4. (Get out of the way) Remain ignorant of the similarities/differences and > remain impartial. > > Of course, deciding on one could also be a case-by-case basis. Maybe for one > use you decide on one for one reason, and for the other case you decide on > another option. > > Thank you for choosing number 3 and casting a vote without understanding. > Any other stance is understandable, but like most people, you choose to hurt > the social group you are participating in by making uninformed decisions. >
That's not quite fair. Suppose I'm looking at working with a PostgreSQL database, and I have five options: 1) Write SQL and use libpq (if C) or psycopg2 (if Python) 2) Use Fred's Fancy Feature-Rich Database Interface 3) Use Joe's Simple Database Interface 4) Use Nancy's Dict-Like Database Interface 5) Bypass all libraries and open a socket connection on port 5432 I have a fairly good understanding of what's needed for option 5, as I've worked with Pike's PostgreSQL module. And it's a lot of work, so I wouldn't do it. (That would be your choice 1, "Lead".) But it's not worth my time to learn three pieces of middle-ware before making my decision, so I'm going to remain fairly ignorant of at least two of them - I'd look at their quick-start guides and basic feature lists, possibly pick one of them to explore in detail, and then make a decision between that and the first option. Ultimately, I have to make a decision, because code can't be impartial - either I'm using some module or I'm not - and it's usually impossible to truly become educated on all the options. So I'd say there's more of a spectrum between your choices 1 and 3 than you imply. Perhaps I can word it this way: Choose one of the options you know about, and the quality of the decision scales with the number of other options you also know. (Which is why I like to know huge numbers of programming languages. When I choose Python for a job, it's because it's better than possibly a hundred other languages that I could have chosen.) ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
