Regardless of whether the original posting is a trolling attempt or not, the argument does have value that I want to corroborate with an anecdote.
At one Python conference in Italy, participants were given an elegantly designed and well-crafted t-shirt with a writing in large characters that read "Beautiful is better than ugly" in reference to the Zen of Python. Back home, a close person who is not a Python programmer nor familiar with PEP 20 saw the t-shirt. They were horrified by the out-of-context sentence for reasons similar to what has been already stated in support of this argument. It prompted them of lookism and judgmentality, and found the message to be disturbing in its suggestion to compare by some standard of beauty and to discriminate. Let me add some context: this person is socially and politically active (maybe what someone would call a "SJW"; definitely not what anyone would call "politically correct"), and is specially sensitive to issues of discrimination and sexism. This was enough, though, for me to wonder what kind of message I would be projecting by wearing that writing on me. I've been since then discouraged to ever wear the t-shirt in any public context. This story might have limited value because it's one anecdote, and because the central point is the impact of the clause when taken out of its original context. I don't want to construct this as an argument in favor of removal of the clause, but I want to mention this as evidence that it does carry emotionally (negatively) charged content. If this content can be avoided without compromising the purpose and function of the message, than by all means I would welcome and support the change. It's meaningful, as a community, to show willingness to respond to discomfort of any kind. In this case, I even see the potential to convey the original message in a more powerful way than the current formulation does. I'm not a good candidate for this, as the chosen language for this community is English, which is not my native language nor a language I feel very good at. I appreciate the poetic style of the original, and I think that Tim Peters has done an outstanding job at capturing these ideas into easy and humor-rich language. The opportunity would be to express the idea of aesthetic appeal of code in some way beyond the simplistic judgmental labelling of "beautiful" vs "ugly". To be fair, in my experience this has been a source of confusion to many Python newcomers, as the notion of "beauty", as with any other value judgment, is highly relative to the subject evaluating it. I've seen people think of the Python community as conceited because they would think they possess some absolute metric of beauty. One way out of the impasse is to draw upon the feeling behind the adjective. We call "beautiful" something that appeals to us, makes us comfortable, or inspires us awe. Ugly is something that makes us uncomfortable, repels us, disconcerts us. "Let awe and disconcert drive you"? "Attraction and repulsion are important"? "If it disturbs you, it's probably wrong"? I know these are terrible and will all fail the spirit and the style of the original, but I'm dropping suggestions with the hope to stimulate some constructive thought on the matter. I'm fine with PEP 20 being unchanged; and my goal is not to find a replacement or urge for a change, but rather to be willing to think about it. Cheers, Davide _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
