Christopher Oliver wrote: > It's not personal, Bertrand. If someone does good work or makes a valid > point I will give them proper respect. If not, well, I'm not teaching > grade school and it's not my job to sugar coat it.
Really? Wasn't that you that disliked the way Pierpaolo and myself avoided the sugar coating when we criticized the FOM design?
To be honest, Pier's tone doesn't bother me, because he always has been able to back it up with valid points, real code, and humorous side comments.
Again, you fail to understand that what appears to be "pointless refactoring" for you might well be what turns a sandboxed one-man-show proposal into the official community-supported cocoon template system.
Actually, I think I do (and did) understand that. And Daniel's and some others specific suggestions about how to improve the code seem very valid to me. So more power to them. However, mixed in that discussion were a number of silly ideas (which somehow need to be identified as such in order to make positive progress - and when that happens it can be painful or embarassing for somebody who feels personally responsible for them - but that's part of life).
William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, in their book "The Elements of Style" (New York, 1959) [page 70] write: "No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing".
Let's face it: your code is dense as a neutron star and dense of comments and tests as the the outter space around one.
For what it's worth I do like _your_ writing style above.
Your respect/care for the complexity of the social dynamics that originate around it is close to zero.
Now, let me tell _you_ a story:
I play basketball 3-4 nights a week at the park by my house - "streetball", not organized basketball. Now basketball is a fast paced game that requires split-second decision making. As a result even the best players make mistakes in virtually every game. When an experienced player commits a turnover, misses an easy shot, misses a defensive assigment or whatever, there's no feeling of embarassment because it's known to be part of the game. However, inexperienced players tend to take their own mistakes as a personal reflection on their ability and tend to get embarassed or angry when one of their teamates points it out.
Now, since this is streetball and anyone can play, many different people of different skill levels show up. However, in this case there is a harsh reality that if you don't know how to play the game well enough, you're likely to get embarassed by getting scored on, having the ball stolen from you, or your shots rejected. The only way not to get embarassed is to improve your game, to learn from your own mistakes - persevering through those embarassing moments - and to learn from other players. Anyone who has achieved any skill at basketball has gone through this process.
The avalon project was taken over by peop le like you, that considered "consensus by friction" a better way to achieve progress and reduce the noisy babbage of social interaction with "inferior" talents. Result: social entropy expansion that lead to thermal death.
I don't agree that I am anything like them and I don't think you would say that if your really knew me.
Technical problems are way more trivial to solve than social ones.
Personally, I find both types of problems hard to solve.
Everybody here welcomes contributions, not matter how silly, not matter how technologically savvy, now matter how outrageous and no matter how sinful and ranting. But respect for your peers is key.
Unfortunately, true respect is earned, not given. So it's not that simple.
-- Stefano.
As for Tony, I believe if you look back you might notice that I took the initiative in adding the excellent flowscript tutorial that he wrote to Cocoon. Hopefully, he does feel that was a compliment (which it was).
-- Chris
