Comment by batista | Hacker News Reader

Comment by batista | Hacker News Reader

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>If we want computing to be a friendly and welcoming field and contribute to the betterment of humanity, we can't tolerate people who behave like this in public.

Other people can't tolerate overly-polite, overly-cautious, overly-friendly, overly-political-aware, overly-PC tone.

It makes us droozy and keeps the discussion in a level better suited for enterprise brainstorming meetings and committees. Everybody looses.

Tech and science leaders where very frequently passionate and prone to rant. Just think of Torvalds reactions to (what he thinks are) stupid ideas in the kernel list -- even if he's wrong, it helps keep everybody vigilant and agitated for his contributions.

>If we want computing to be a friendly and welcoming field and contribute to the betterment of humanity, we can't tolerate people who behave like this in public.

The aim is not to make computing a "friendly and welcoming field" (that would be the boy scouts), it's to make it an effective, productive and interesting to work in field.

If you start judging contributions to a field by politeness of "behavior in public" then you're doing the field a disfavor.

The biggest scientist in some field could as well be a huge jerkoff -- for example, Djikstra was known for his passionate rants and snarky tone against everything he considered a bad practice.

You're setting up a false dichotomy. There is a middle ground between behaving like an asshole and too much diplomacy. Do you really think respectful disagreement is the same as being "overly-PC"? Torvalds is a little harsh sometimes, but it's nothing compared to the disgusting rudeness of this rant.

Yes it's a great point. Too often we try and reduce things to black and white when nearly everything is a shade of gray.

I've never understood that "shades of gray" line. How about some color?

Edit: this seems to need clarifying. I understand what the line means. What I don't understand is why people use it so much when it repeats the error it purports to correct. In nearly every case where "reality is either 0 or 1" is wrong, "reality is some coefficient of a single variable between 0 and 1" is just as wrong. That is a poor way to champion the richness of reality. What's interesting is how it corresponds to the emotional crimpedness of a world in which everything is gray.

It's a gradient, not a binary.

Adding colors to the metaphor adds words with no increase of understanding.

Understanding is not disjoint from emotion.

What is this, arguing for the sake of arguing? He answered your question perfectly. Adding color for "emotions" makes absolutely no sense in this context.

No, but using a broken metaphor confuses things. The phrase:

"Don't see things as either black or white, the world has millions of hues"

conveys the message that situations are nuanced as well as being truer to how things are with respect to color.

So, it's better than some constrained metaphor about a BW gradient (much more since lots of people don't even know what a gradient is).

The metaphor isn't broken. What you propose is broken.

The word "gradient" isn't even part of the metaphor, so I don't see how that would cause confusion. What comes between black and white? Gray. Not millions of color hues. Shades of gray makes sense and fighting to try and get colors in the mix somewhere is only serving to muddy this up.

Edit: Actually, here's another perspective: millions of color hues come between black and white only if you're thinking about colors to begin with. (Black and white aren't strictly considered colors even.) So while I can see where you're getting this from, I still think it doesn't serve anyone well to try and spice it up from the very well understood meaning of the phrase.

"black or white" is a dot. "shades of gray" is like an axis on which you can plot points.

"color" on the other hand is like a 3-dimensional space, and so points can no longer be compared and sorted. How do you compare green with blue? You cannot.

On the topic, you can compare the rudeness of two messages and you can also establish some threshold over which the rudeness is no longer acceptable. That's why people use the "shades of gray" metaphor, because it's still useful.

And indeed, life has color, but that's why life is complicated, which is why we feel the need to simplify its dynamics.

How is he acting like an asshole or being rude? Torvalds is WAY ruder than this guy.

I don't know what you're projecting onto this essay to find it assholey or rude, but it's bunk.

Frankly, I'm disappointed that he failed to condemn namespaces.

To be fair, the rant was written in 2002. While namespaces existed as a W3C REC as of 1999, I don't recall them being used much in practice until significantly later than that (as is usual for anything going from committee spec to the real world). Had he written it later, he may very well have ripped on namespaces.

On the contrary, this kind of social incontinence inhibits the exchange of ideas. Most of the best people leave as the discourse degrades toward toxicity. Comp.lang.lisp was a dramatic example.

Diverting one's personal emotional issues into public technical debates is not courage.

It is important to have strong opinionated technical arguments unsullied by consensus building distraction. Naggum's writing here is not an example of that. He is opinionated about irrelevant non-technical issues. This type of behavior sabotages the efforts of those who might strive to actually win the technical argument on the merits.

How about this: Argue the point. Do it passionately or humerously or snarky if it works for you. The problem with the OP is his snarks and sarcasm are disconnected from his technical points. His actual technical point are few and far between, and generally not argued very well at all.

It's about being objective.

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