@suhr
As a someone from Russia, I can say there are different kinds of harshness.
Well, let’s actually analyze what was actually written.
For example:
The reason Pharo crashes with newer compilers is because newer compilers tend to exploit C semantics, and in particular undefined behavior, better.
This is somewhat reasonable.
That quote is not even close to being harsh, IMHO. It just states facts. IMHO, the problem, if any, is in the next sentence
Pharo programmers used fork without understanding what it does (next to some other out of bounds issue being present).
Because how did 0xABAB know that? Did he live with Pharo’s programmers in the same house? Consult them? Unlikely. Had he provided some proof of that sentence, I would have absolutely no claims against that comment.
What would happen if there was a space? (This is a rhetorical question, since you clearly have no idea how to write a shell script. Oh, and for the love of $DEITY, please test your code before you say more stupid things.)
This is not.
Internally, I substituted that with
What would happen if there was a space? (This is a rhetorical question, since you clearly have not tested what you wrote above, please test your code before you say more stupid things.)
which with that applied, IMHO, became very reasonable. It would have been perfectly OK for me if it were formulated this way in the original.
IMHO, the problem with the original is
since you clearly have no idea how to write a shell script
part, which, given I’m trying give constructive comments on the topic is a factually incorrect statement (true, I might have had some of a “wrong idea”, but clearly not “no idea”), and a bit of a personal attack. The $DEITY part I don’t really feel too strongly about.
The rest of the conversation is similar:
@oxij So, now you are saying that tooling which is as old as UNIX itself has changed semantics as opposed to the simpler explanation that in 1998 you didn’t know what you were doing (something which is ostensibly true in 2017)? Bold, very bold.
opposed to the simpler explanation that in 1998 you didn’t know what you were doing
Correct, I was a child. I totally remember having bash issues with variable substitution and spaces, but it was 1998, I was a child, and I don’t remember what I did exactly. For some weird shit I remember doing I have an explanation (e.g. not knowing ^C exists), for some I still don’t.
something which is ostensibly true in 2017
But that statement is factually incorrect given my previous comment, also a bit of a personal attack.
And so on for the rest of the conversation.
IMHO, the problem with that conversation there was that 0xABAB ignored my explanations of how I came to the original conclusion
I got bitten by not having enough quotes in bash enough times to prefer adding more than strictly required.
ignored my technical arguments “well, yeah, sure, I have not tested that bit and my perception of the old bash seems to be factually wrong, sorry about that, thanks for pointing that out, but if the semantics were to change I would not be surprised, because it does change from time to time” (which is the short version of most of the stuff I wrote there) and “it won’t hurt to have quotes there anyway, let’s stop the bike-shedding” and continued to combine small bits of personal attacks into what turned into an ugly conversation.
The
You should learn to recognize a superior force when you meet one.
bit was actually funny, IMHO. (I do recognize that it was probably meant literally, but not being lazy to do your research does make a “super power”, kind of, so “superior force” it is kind of funny.)
Btw, the outcome of a similar analysis of my own statements regarding the relationship between NixOS and PulseAudio had been this: I shall not use words with negative connotations applicable to people to describe a perceived state of things, emotionally charged readers will ignore the complete statements and parse the writing using from those words alone; emotionally charged readers will ignore any otherwise valid arguments; anyone can become emotionally changed when confronted with inconvenient facts.
[I.e., while, I don’t think I made any false statements in those conversations (including, about people; to those involved: yes, including, go read the original statements as they are, not as you remember them), I could have made the issue much nicer if I had internalized something like RMS’s “Kind Communication Guidelines” before (which he wrote much later, but it doesn’t excuse me, of course).]
What to do with my “smugness” I still have no idea. Hence, still
Any guidelines?
@srhb
I’d like to eventually see some kind of code of conduct if someone seriously puts one forward and we have people willing to enforce it.
It is “enforce” part I’m mostly worried about. People involved in software development are usually nerds, and nerds are usually very opinionated. Enforcement by highly opinionated people usually turns into ostracizing for wrongthink, or, worse, inquisition.
Even after everything that was said about 0xABAB I’m not sure that the way was he was banned was totally okay. Sure, his demerits and all of that, but the conversation in https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/27244 says to me that he was not properly warned. The fact that @vcunat at the time did not know that 0xABAB was banned is also surprising, to say the least.
I.e. I think that, at the very least, “the last warning” and the bans themselves must be public. In particular, you can’t appeal a ban if you don’t know why was you banned in the first place. Nor can you make any conclusions and fix your conduct. Nor can others easily find what is considered not acceptable in this community and learn without triggering the system.
I also think it’s important to be explicit about never letting technical merits be an excuse for lax standards in communication.
I might disagree depending on the definition of “lax standards”. I think straight-in-your-face criticism must not be outlawed, in fact, I think, it should be encouraged. To me, the lack of straight-in-your-face criticism means “lax standards”, not the other way around.
The universe does not care about your particular culture. Straight-in-your-face criticism is the only way this universe makes any progress: be it evolution (“Hey, you suck! You are dead! You won’t have any more children! Ha! Straight in your face, individual!”), or anonymous peer review in scientific research.
[Btw, I think the Western culture is actually regressive on the latter point, that became “science” in the West was known as “alchemy” before the invention of anonymous peer-review, even today everything that does not go via proper anonymous peer-review (like a lot of medical research, for instance) usually sucks. Which is why the science in the West actually progresses when encumbering “influential” scientists die (a problem that would be much less of an issue if sciences were actually publicly funded, not via some government bureaucracy allocating funds by looking at some nonsense numbers, btw, but still). Apparently, same problem exists in the East, with the “losing your face” tradition and stuff. But, apparently, this was not a big problem in the Soviet Union (at least in the falsifiable technical fields acceptable by Marxist-Leninist ideology, Marxist-Leninist humanities sucked even more than humanities suck everywhere else), where negative peer-reviews were actually frequently signed by their authors, and being straight-in-your-face destroyed at “kandidat’s” (Ph.D) defense was a fairly common thing (and, apparently, still is in Russia and Post-Soviet states in most actually working “dissertation committees”). Yes, I know I am oversimplifying a bit, but still.
Note that such a system actually combines the merits straight-in-your-faceness of anonymous peer-review with the institution of reputation, which can be useful (as it can be harmful). I don’t know of a simpler system that can implement both, everything I know of seems to require pseudonyms anyway.
(Which is yet another reason why ML’s are preferable to GitHub, IMHO. An anonymous review to ML is easy to implement, anonymous review to GitHub PR is not.)]