Dear all, I am the maintainer of an Italian translation of the Python Tutorial: https://pytutorial-it.readthedocs.io. Since the Italian translation is kept in sync with the original repo (across all the branches!), from time to time I get an alert when a change is committed.
This morning I noticed this new commit, referring to bpo-42179: "Remove mention of __cause__" (https://bugs.python.org/issue42179). From reading this thread, it turns out that a minor confusion in the wording, about __cause__ and __context__, very quickly turned into the decision to completely remove any reference to __cause__, the reason being that "generally speaking (...) we should *reduce* some details from tutorial". While I have no particular opinion on this specific case, I would strongly urge you not to remove random bits of information from the tutorial, even when a link to a specific article is handy. We all know that the tutorial is "too difficult", not really suitable for beginners (perhaps not even Python beginners!). Having spent a couple of weeks translating it as recently as this spring, I am well aware of this. At times, it feels more like a demo or a features' showcase: a feeling reinforced, by the way, often by the *recent* additions like the special parameters syntax (https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/controlflow.html#special-parameters). However, unless someone undertakes a sweeping rewriting of the tutorial (and until they do), I think it would be unwise to start cherry-picking the occasional bit of information to expunge or "simplify" from time to time, without an overall guideline. Reason is, right now the tutorial is packed with informations (beginner-unfriendly as they might be) that you would be hard pressed to find elsewhere in the documentation: see the aforementioned section on special parameters; see the maddening chapter on Classes (and especially the exposition on scopes and namespaces); see, of course, the floating point appendix; and I could go on. My concern here is that if you start removing or simplifying some "too-difficult-for-a-tutorial" bits of information on an occasional basis, and without too much scrutiny or editorial guidance, you will end up loosing something precious. Like everyone, I also look forward to an overall rewriting of the tutorial; but in the meantime, I would kindly ask you to be very careful and conservative about deleting information solely for "didactic" reasons. thanks a lot riccardo polignieri _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/WNHVZLEO3ZVDOFP2FHRBUQR4GY24RIJJ/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
