Talk:Python (programming language)

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Contents 1 POV issues 2 avoiding naming collisions 3 Good Article Nomination 4 Spelling 5 <references /> columns

[edit] POV issues

There's a whole bunch of statements in this article that are dubious from a POV perspective, and some which are probably unverifiable. Most of them are vague peacock praise for Python that doesn't provide any actual evidence. I'm grouping the whole lot under POV because it comes down to people not being sufficiently careful about writing in a neutral style. It needs careful triage and editing, and would probably benefit from attention by editors who are not programmers at all and knows nothing about python (most of this is not specialist stuff, just statements that don't even pretend to be factual information, and it's easier to spot those if you aren't involved).

Things I spotted offhand, without really looking hard (intended as examples, not an exhaustive list of stuff to fix):

1. The philosophy behind Python is noteworthy among high-level programming languages

   Peacock phrase. "noteworthy" is an opinion, not a fact

2. The majority of Python's major features were present in this initial release

   Groan-worthy phrasing, and "major features" is at best unsourced, but sounds like an opinion to me - what makes those features major?

3. The Python programming language is actively used in industry and academia for a wide variety of purposes.

   Another peacock statement. Used by whom? For what purposes? There's a short list, but that doesn't substantiate "wide variety" and this statement adds no useful information to the article.

4. It aims toward an uncluttered visual layout, uses English keywords frequently where other languages use punctuation, and has notably fewer syntactic constructions than many structured languages such as C, Perl, or Pascal.

   Unsourced, and probably unverifiable - the decision of how to count "syntactic constructions" is essentially arbitrary. The reader can't learn anything much from this sentence.

5. This is a boon for those learning the language and experienced developers alike

   Poetic, grandiose... peacock.

6. As well, the Python shell is often used to interactively perform system tasks, such as modifying files.

   Unverifiable and mostly meaningless statement.

7. The codebase is written in compliant C89[26], and is thus easily portable to most operating systems, especially POSIX-compliant or Unix-like operating systems.

   The second part of this statement is unsourced, largely because it's wrong - merely writing something in compliant C89 does not make it "easily portable to most operating systems", even if you can agree on what qualifies as "most operating systems".

8. Several other experimental implementations have been created, but have not yet been widely adopted.

   Vague, unsourced, no useful information content.

I don't have the energy to fix this thing right now, so tagging POV-check. There's almost certainly more than I've listed here. Careful review is needed to find all the ones I didn't. Asuffield 09:54, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Rewritten 1 and 2, removed 3, tagged 4 (this is a stated goal in the philosophy which needs linked), removed 5, rewritten 6 and 7, removed 8. Thanks. Chris Cunningham 16:02, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] avoiding naming collisions

This is not about the article itself, so to keep in line with wikipedia policy, I posted the question here instead. If anyone is watching this, pls help if you can. pls don't bite the noob. Thanks. NoClutter 17:39, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Good Article Nomination Good morning (GMT time); I have reviewed this article on 23:45, Sunday April 8, 2007 (UTC) in accordance with the Good Article (GA) criteria. There are seven main criteria that the article must comply with to pass: Well-written: Pass Factually accurate: Pass Broad: Pass Neutrally written: Pass Stable: Pass Well-referenced: Pass Images: Pass I have concluded that, in my opinion, the article has passed all categories and I therefore award it GA status. Congratulations to the lead editors, and keep up the excellent work! Kindest regards, anthonycfc [talk] 06:04, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Spelling

At the moment, the article uses a hodge-podge if -ise and -ize spellings. This should be made consistent. The question is, which way? Python's style guides don't specify, and it's used on both sides of the Atlantic. So it seems to depend on which editor actually does the task. If I do it, I will move towards -ise spellings, but I will not complain if someone goes ahead and makes it all use -ize before I do this. I'll do it tomorrow, providing no-one beats me to the punch or provides a strong argument otherwise. 88.111.218.237 21:07, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Also, it's Random Useless Statistic Time: there are 3 genuine -ize/ization/izing words, versus 7 genuine -ise/isation/ising words in the current version. Make of that what you will. 88.111.218.237 21:21, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, but four of those are variants of "optimise" in a single paragraph, and there are two -ized/izes words you may have missed :p. FWIW, the Python documentation heavily prefers American spellings, except for a few modules in the standard library. But I don't feel strongly about it. — Miles (Talk) 02:13, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] <references /> columns

Unfortunately, it is not only low screen resolutions affected by this. If I were to try to print this article with two columns of references with full-size text (hey, reading a too-small printout is awful!), with some only marginally longer than average URLs, they bleed into the next column too. (On Firefox at least, this can be simulated by clicking the 'Printable version' link in the toolbox, and selecting File -> Print preview. At 100% text size, it happens on several URLs, and even at 70% (which, IMHO, is about the minimum size that's actually usable for me), there's one link that spills over.)

Seeing as this has been changed twice in the past few days, I'm taking this to talk to solicit feedback and rationales. Ideally, there'd be some magical template that can detect the screen width being used, and automatically compute the width needed for its reference list, but as far as I know there's no such thing. Abednigo 16:02, 29 March 2007 (UTC)