Inessential Weirdnesses



  • http://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2014/08/10/1

    Unfortunately, I'm thinking most open source developers will cite this list with pride.



  • Yes, obviously, a group of people doing what works for them should change what works for them. For you, who isn't even interested. But insists on posting anti-open source FUD.



  • this

  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    There are a fair number of open source guys who fit this stereotype, but there are a LOT more than are the antithesis of this. I have met far more open source guys who just want to write fun software and do a good job of it. They do it to hone their skills, to work with groups and to make a difference.

    Say what you will, but there are more websites running open source software than are not.



  • I'm torn about this.

    On one hand, sounds like one of those newfangled ultra-PC "let's include everyone into everything" spiels. If you don't like the prevailing culture of a community, too fucking bad. They are not required to bend over backwards to appease some special snowflake. You want to join - you adjust to them. If you don't want to, nothing's stopping you from creating your own group with the culture you like.

    On the other, a community will grow stronger with the influx of fresh blood. Even better if the new people are not the same kind of douchebags you already have. Also, it's not like any of those things they list are strictly necessary to collaborate on a software project, which is the whole goal here.

    So, like I said, I'm torn.



  • We came up with:

    • git
    • ...
    • all the Monty Python and scifi references/analogies
    • ...

    So apparently they're claiming ownership of those things now.



  • Oh wow, the article cites geekfeminism.wikia.com. I guess that's how we know it's reliable.



  • That website is not helping the authors argument.



  • @Matches said:

    That website is not helping the authors argument.

    I'm not even sure just what her argument is. The Class Matters link does do a good job of explaining the difference between essential and inessential weirdnesses (although I'm pretty sure I disagree with everything else on the site). But Harihareswara herself doesn't seem to have much of a point. She (I think it's a she) starts out talking about the open source community, but then veers off to talking about conferences, and never ties the two topics together, nor (except for git's learning curve) even addresses why these alleged weirdnesses are bad for the open source community.

    I disagree with the designation of some of so-called inessential weirdnesses, and even that some of them are weirdnesses at all. As a potential contributor to an open source project, you may disagree with the project's choice of version control system or communication among developers and consider it a weirdness, but the project has to choose something, and making a different choice would just alienate a different group. Whatever they choose, once the project has chosen it, it becomes an essential weirdness. You either use the chosen tools, or you don't contribute; this is not a situation in which inclusiveness is really feasible.



  • Woo! Look at that! Programmers have communities and cultures on the internet, who would have thought that programmers aren't just brainless machines spitting out code for their corporate overlords.


  • BINNED

    The plaintext email is just bugging me.

    What the fuck is your problem with plaintext email? Seriously? If I don't need any formatting, tables, pictures or spinning GIFs, whay the fuck should my email be wrapped in a few <p> tags? Do you feel sorry for the tags not being used? Does your email client suck so much that it can't handle text?

    I send everything in plaintext by default because I fucking know it works everywhere. Whatever kind of a screwy email client you might be using, you'll get it, and it will be readable. And if I include any formatting it converts to HTML automagically. It requires no intervention on my part, nor on the receiver's part.

    Someone explain to me, where the fuck is the weird part?



  • Realistically, the problem is people bitching when people don't use plain text emails for pointless reasons like "saving bandwidth".

    This is a phenomenon I haven't seen since about 1999, though.


  • BINNED

    I bitch at it if it breaks because the email client it was sent from is doing some weird shit with it that's not to spec and thus breaks in everything else. Though I didn't see that in years so I guess it's fine these days.

    The actual scourge is people sending .doc or .docx attachments to me when unnecessary. These include:

    • Documents I have no reason to edit, ever. PDF or something, please? Hell, less chance of it falling apart due to different versions is a freebie!
    • Documents with no formatting information of any kind, just a blob of text I need to read and/or copy&paste somewhere
    • Documents that are not even fucking necessary because it's just 3 lines of text that could've been included in the fucking email body

    Why do I have to start an office suite to read this shit? I have a perfectly good email client here! Just paste it in you bastard!



  • People around here love to send Word documents as a container for screen grabs.


  • BINNED

    $1 million idea!

    Create an application where you give it an image, it then puts it over an image of a wooden table, puts that in a Word document and sends it as an email!

    Wodden Table Forwarding Mail Client sounds like a decent name...


    Filed under: Had to get an F in there


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @ben_lubar said:

    So apparently they're claiming ownership of those things now.

    I rather got the impression they were saying the prevalence of those things (along with things like requiring the use of plain text emails rather than web based forums where you can cornify everything (in PINK!!!) when collaborating with other members of a development team, the use of scientific terms rather than using terms even a luddite would recognise) is what's wrong with the development community.

    Meh.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Onyx said:

    The plaintext email is just bugging me.

    What the fuck is your problem with plaintext email? Seriously?

    You can't have multi-coloured plain-text email. With pictures of PONIES!!! (ASCII art doesn't count.)

    That's what their problem is. That and you're telling not to use something they simply must use because reasons and you're stopping them.



  • Basically, you're denying them their right to be a special snowflake and use html all up in their email.


  • BINNED

    @trithne said:

    Basically, you're denying them their right to be a special snowflake and use html all up in their email.

    @PJH, I hereby officially request that those people never be given special snowflake badges.

    Because reasons.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    Unfortunately, I'm thinking most open source developers will cite this list with pride.

    And plenty of others who will denounce it just because.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    "how MANY licenses there are"

    This one is particularly silly. Seems like it belongs more on an essential weirdness list, if anything. But I can't figure out what's weird about it.

    "Our (very white?) use of standard English,"

    Fo shizzle.



  • @trithne said:

    Basically, you're denying them their right to be a special snowflake and use html all up in their email.

    Sadly this is true. Need to have italics for emphasis! The kernel mailing list would be shear chaos if HTML emails were allow. Good bye being able discuss code as every email client does its own implementation of quoting!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @delfinom said:

    Good bye being able discuss code as every email client does its own implementation of quoting!

    highlight.js. Just sayin'..


    Oh, what do you mean...

    
    ­```vb
    Module Hello
      Sub Main() 'comment
          MsgBox("Hello, World!") ' Display message on computer screen.
      End Sub 
    End Module
    ­```
    

    ~~>

    Module Hello
      Sub Main() 'comment
          MsgBox("Hello, World!") ' Display message on computer screen.
      End Sub 
    End Module
    

    (Crossing fingers and hoping this cooks like it looks like in preview...)



  • Holy shit. I just read the linked page. CONFERENCES ALIENATE PEOPLE! WHAT IF I CAN'T AFFORD TO GO?

    All this shit about "safe spaces" pisses me off. If you can't deal with the culture, get the fuck out of that culture. Oh, but that's exclusive! We should be including everyone, even if that means tearing the culture out of the existing group to replace it with our own.

    The Tech crowd (particularly what's still around of the older tech crowd), was thankfully made up of people with a strong resistance to bullshit, so the cultural whitewashing crowd is bouncing off of it a lot.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @trithne said:

    All this shit about "safe spaces" pisses me off.

    I think it's legit, at least in some circumstances. But not to the extent that "white english" or plain text email is a contributor.



  • @PJH said:

    highlight.js. Just sayin'..


    Oh, what do you mean...

    <pre><code>
    ­vb Module Hello Sub Main() 'comment MsgBox("Hello, World!") ' Display message on computer screen. End Sub End Module &shy;
    </code></pre>

    ~~>

    Module Hello
      Sub Main() 'comment
          MsgBox("Hello, World!") ' Display message on computer screen.
      End Sub 
    End Module
    

    (Crossing fingers and hoping this cooks like it looks like in preview...)

    Are you seriously suggesting we start letting Javascript run in emails?
    The problem is one email client will do a pre, another will do some crap bullshit div shit for quotes, another will use blockquotes and the list goes on. Good luck discussing anything as you have nothing but differing styles shitting up the chain.

    Then you have the autoquote feature which is somehow always default in HTML clients so you end up with this gigantic blob of crap at the end of every email nobody needs to read because they already got emails A,B,C,D before E.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @delfinom said:

    Are you seriously suggesting we start letting Javascript run in emails?

    Oh yes.

    That's exactly what I'm doing.

    :to peanut gallery: Isn't it boys and girls?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    While the first set of items probably was inessential weirdness, Mary Gardiner's list (reproduced below, with some indicated elisions to keep the quote size down) merely indicates that she's got no idea what she's talking about; they're mostly essential features:

    • Use of email lists rather than web forums
    • Use of plain text rather than HTML email (or even knowing that these are things)
    • Use of IRC
    • Really context-dependent naming: Almost universal use of wallet names in email and almost universal use of pseudonyms on IRC for example
    • Our (very white?) use of standard English, with a mainstream minority using Latin plurals and into older styles of prescriptivist grammar
    • All the mathematics and CS terminology: "transitive", "orthogonal", etc.
    • Conferences themselves. […]
    Programmers use CS terminology? And actually remember what grammar is and have a proper education? Who knew?


  • I instantly regret making this topic.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I instantly regret making this topic.

    I regret having looked at the page you linked to in the OP.



  • @pjh, I think this deserves a post ninja'd badge.



  • Don't make me quote my quote thread, it's too early.

    The tldr is discourse has 5 methods of quoting, none are consistent and none behave the same way with text in out our around the quote.

    But javascript in emails would still be fun.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    I instantly regret making this topic.

    Why don't you educate us on why the list is something to be ashamed of? Aside from git...I'm not defending that, and you've said enough already.



  • Well, if the open source community doesn't give a shit that they're alienating people and nobody can use their shitty tools, then I guess it's not.

    The problem is, almost every open source project has a big-ass webpage that's like, "HEY HELP OUR PROJECT, COME CONTRIBUTE" and it's pretty fucking hypocritical if you're like "come contribute" on one hand, and then, "oh BTW we use Git with no normal person can figure out in less than 6 months" on another.

    Figure out what your goal is. Move towards that goal.

    If you run an open source project, and if your goal is getting people to contribute, then do stuff to make it easy to get people to contribute. Simple, right? But here's the catch: don't ostensibly ask people to contribute, then make it fucking difficult as shit to actually do so. Don't ask for people to contribute, then completely ignore their contributions (for example, how almost every single bug I've ever been filed in an open source bug tracker has been treated*). You can't say one thing and do another.

    Oh, and what bugs me about the mailing list thing is three-fold:

    1. There's no point in being pissy about HTML email. Look, if people want to write plain text, they can do that in HTML email as well. HTML doesn't prevent you from doing that. If your mail server can't handle HTML emails, it is broken shit.
    2. Communication via email lists suuucks. And before I get the expected response: no I'm not saying web forums are necessarily better. I'm saying email lists suck ass. That's a different thing.
    3. It reeks of "we've always done it this way". Why do open source projects use email lists? Because that's how things worked in 1994 and daggummit we ain't gonna change now!

    *) With the kudos to Mozilla, who has a 50/50 track record on actually fixing shit. Except the one they fixed was obviously in violation of the DOM spec, while the one they didn't the DOM spec is so fucking vague and useless and written by dumbshits (natch) it's not even certain it's a bug at all.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    A what badge?



  • Don't act like you've never made a new badge.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    I haven't. They're all @dhromed's doing...

    😇



  • So you only read the first and maybe even the sixth point in the first list and were not appalled by the attention-seeking tripe after that?
    I wish I could read as selectively as you do.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    and it's pretty fucking hypocritical if you're like "come contribute" on one hand, and then, "oh BTW we use Git with no normal person can figure out in less than 6 months" on another.

    I don't fully agree with the premise, but I also don't participate in any open source projects that use git (I've only used svn or hg with open source stuff).

    @blakeyrat said:

    But here's the catch: don't ostensibly ask people to contribute, then make it fucking difficult as shit to actually do so.

    I find nothing objectionable here, but I don't understand the connection to the original link.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Why do open source projects use email lists?

    I like them because I have a local archive of stuff to go back and read and search and reference created for me automatically.



  • @boomzilla said:

    I find nothing objectionable here, but I don't understand the connection to the original link.

    That's the FUCKING POINT OF THE LIST.

    Things the community does that accidentally alienates newcomers to the community.

    Boomzilla, I thought you were getting not-awful but I was wrong.



  • @boomzilla said:

    I like them because I have a local archive of stuff to go back and read and search and reference created for me automatically.

    And if you want to find something from before you subscribed to the list? Oops, fucked! Also it's much more efficient to have 30,000 people all keep their own special local archives rather than putting it in a centralized location, that's true open source efficiency in action!


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    That's the FUCKING POINT OF THE LIST.

    Things the community does that accidentally alienates newcomers to the community.

    Ah, so communities would be better off if we had no personality. I guess that's true to a certain extent.

    @blakeyrat said:

    And if you want to find something from before you subscribed to the list? Oops, fucked! Also it's much more efficient to have 30,000 people all keep their own special local archives rather than putting it in a centralized location, that's true open source efficiency in action!

    Yes, these are negative trade offs. Of course, many lists have a centralized location for that sort of thing, too. But at least I'm not pretending there are no benefits of doing things other ways.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Boomzilla, I thought you were getting not-awful but I was wrong.

    I'm the same as ever, but let me know when you think I'm getting that way, because game over. Game over, man.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Ah, so communities would be better off if we had no personality.

    It has nothing to do with personality, it has to do with alienating people. You can have a unique personality without alienating people, to use an example that seems to be being talked about in the news a lot this week, Robin Williams.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    It has nothing to do with personality, it has to do with alienating people

    I can see how the ones talking about "scorn" could be alienating, obviously, though the stuff about email addresses I haven't seen in a long time, and it was an internet community thing first, and I suppose some OS communities inherited it.

    But aside from stuff that's obviously rude, I don't see how this stuff is obviously alienating, aside from, like I said, people having personalities and a community personality. Communities are typically strong when there are shared values and references.

    I guess if you don't like that stuff, you're less likely to want to be part of the community. If that's your point, then your point really is that we have to check our personalities at the project door.



  • @boomzilla said:

    But aside from stuff that's obviously rude, I don't see how this stuff is obviously alienating, aside from, like I said, people having personalities and a community personality.

    You don't see how using Git as a critical part of your project is alienating?

    Seriously?

    You honestly don't see that?

    At all?

    @boomzilla said:

    Communities are typically strong when there are shared values and references.

    Right; but things like using mailing lists and IRC instead of a web forum of some sort aren't "shared values", they're just lazy. We do it that way because we've always done it that way. A strong community would periodically go back and re-example their communication methods: is this working for us? How can we improve it? How can we make it more usable and accessible?

    I have a friend who's a part of what started as a MechWarrior 3 clan. As that game lost favor, they moved to MechWarrior 4, then Battlefield, then Call of Duty, then etc. etc. But the core of the community is the same; the culture is the same. It's just the game they're a clan for that changes.

    The Monty Python jokes and typing like an English professor bullshit, that's probably off-putting because nobody sane does it, but at the same time it's also pretty harmless.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    You don't see how using Git as a critical part of your project is alienating?

    Seriously?

    You honestly don't see that?

    At all?

    Eh, OK, I thought I could rely on already conceding that I didn't like git, but I suppose I should have re-iterated that to soothe the pedantic dickweeds.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Right; but things like using mailing lists and IRC instead of a web forum of some sort aren't "shared values", they're just lazy. We do it that way because we've always done it that way. A strong community would periodically go back and re-example their communication methods: is this working for us? How can we improve it? How can we make it more usable and accessible?

    How do you know they don't consider if it's working? Now, I'm kind of hoping it is alienating, because no one should have to put up with the sort of special snowflakes that think that stuff is alienating.



  • @boomzilla said:

    How do you know they don't consider if it's working? Now, I'm kind of hoping it is alienating, because no one should have to put up with the sort of special snowflakes that think that stuff is alienating.

    Right; so the solution is, "we're the high priesthood of technology! If you can't learn our tools, FUCK YOU! If you don't think exactly how we do, FUCK YOU AND GO AWAY! If you have a disability or accessibility needs, FUCK YOU AND GO AWAY AND DIE IN A BASEMENT!"

    Which is the impression I always had of the open source movement, but it's nice of you to reinforce it.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    You don't see how using Git as a critical part of your project is alienating?

    I must do doing it wrong, guess I'll go get SourceSafe snickers



  • Hilarious.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    Right; so the solution is, "we're the high priesthood of technology! If you can't learn our tools, FUCK YOU! If you don't think exactly how we do, FUCK YOU AND GO AWAY! If you have a disability or accessibility needs, FUCK YOU AND GO AWAY AND DIE IN A BASEMENT!"

    If you're too disabled to use email, you're probably too disabled for any other form of online communication. Is this a bad assumption?

    @blakeyrat said:

    Which is the impression I always had of the open source movement, but it's nice of you to reinforce it.

    Yes, you just make shit up.


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