[Python-Dev] Helping contributors with chores (do we have to?) (original) (raw)

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Sun Jun 25 11:27:20 EDT 2017

On Sun, Jun 25, 2017 at 7:25 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

There're also various tools for dealing specifically with git branch layout as used by Github, and every real man writes their own (because it's easier to shoot a 5-liner than to review whether somebody else's tool do what you need or not, it's all trivial git commands anyway). I guess I'm not a "real man" who likes to "shoot 5-liners" made of "trivial git commands" on my free time, then. For some reason I'm not even interested in becoming one. The part of computing where people posture as "real men" (or "wizards") by sequencing arcane commands on ill-conceived UIs has always felt uninteresting and hostile to me.

In the web programming bootcamp that I'm involved with, git is taught in the very first week. It's not some arcane and hostile thing; the command line is a fundamental tool that everyone is expected to become friends with. The students learn about branching and merging (including merge conflicts) and the pull-request workflow on the second day of bootcamp.

Are we "real men" (and real women - we're not sexist here) because we know how to type commands into a terminal? If so, we're making sure the next generation of programmers is exclusively real men and women.

ChrisA

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