On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 17:43, Matthew Brett <matthew.br...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > >>> I'm continuing only because, the discussion has generated some heat, >>> and I think part of that heat comes from the perception that the >>> excellent community spirit of the project is somewhat undermined by >>> the feeling that reasonable arguments are not being fully heard. >> >> How does one get that feeling? > > Is that a real question?
Absolutely. What leads you to believe that the reasonable arguments aren't being heard? If one were to start a thread giving an idea and no one responds while vigorous discussion is happening in other threads, that would certainly be visible evidence of that idea not being fully heard. I'm something at a loss to guess how you would ascertain from a thread that has now gone past a hundred messages (most of which favor the side I presume you think the unheard arguments are coming from) that some of the arguments are not being fully heard. These kinds of decisions entail a lot of judgement calls. How many people are affected by an ABI incompatibility? How capable are they of coping with it? How many will walk back to Matlab because of it? No one knows the answers to these questions. In the absence of actual data, we make guesses and assumptions based on gut feelings distilled from past, anecdotal experience and logical arguments. We can discuss the logical arguments all day long and possibly reach a consensus on which arguments have valid structure and which don't. Arguments are either logically sound, or they're not. We can't really argue those gut feelings into a consensus. They come from personal experience which is different for each individual. They are simply not subject to argument. Hearing your gut feeling does little to change mine, but mine not changing doesn't mean that I ignored you or that I have a closed mind to your point of view. It's really quite easy, in a busy thread such as this one, to fail to address every stated point in detail even though you have considered them and still haven't changed your mind. Here's the problem that I don't think many people appreciate: logical arguments suck just as much as personal experience in answering these questions. You can make perfectly structured arguments until you are blue in the face, but without real data to premise them on, they are no better than the gut feelings. They can often be significantly worse if the strength of the logic gets confused with the strength of the premise. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
