2010-03-17 On Mar 10, 9:17 am, Ben Morrow <b...@morrow.me.uk> wrote: > Also, flamebait language-comparison xposts involving Lisp are one > of Xah Lee's trademarks. You might want to look into not imitating > him/her/it.
being a professional programer today, typically you know more than just one language. Practical questions, discussions, involving more than one language is natural, and in fact happens more and more often in online forums over the past 15 years i've seen. Partly due to, of course, the tremendous birth of languages in the past decade. In the 1980s or 1990s, you don't typically use more than one lang in a project. Today, probably majority of projects requires you to use more than one well known general purpose language. In those times, discussion of more than one language is usually academic comparison. Today, honest post as “i know this in X but how you do in Y” is a common need. The reason they become flame wars is mostly not about the message content. More about tech geeker's sensitivity, with the carried over old school netiquette that any person mentioning lang x in group y must be of no good intentions. If you look at online forums today, in fact most comp lang forums have no problem in mentioning or discussion different languages in context. The problem occur more frequently in free-for-all type of forums where the know-it-all tech geekers reside (the in-group argot is “hacker”), each thinking they are justice kings and queens, take opportunities to ridicule, flame, any post that mention other lang or any thing that doesn't seem to be protective of their lang. This is comp.lang.* newsgroups, with good as well as mostly bad aspects. Of course, the free-for-all nature is precisely the reason most tech geekers stay in newsgroups. A good percentage of them, if not majority, are old timers. Most newsgroup tech geekers consider cross-posting wrong. I consider such taboo in this convention being a major contribution to the redundant creation of new languages, flaws, and foster the hostile faction nature of programing language groups we see. It is sad to say, comp.lang.lisp today is 90% machine generated spam. You see that each time this is brought up in the past 3 years, the regulars are too busy boasting about how they've set up some tech geek system so that spam don't reach their eyes, and sternly sputter about web browser using idiots, with, profuse suggestions from their infinite knowledge about what newsgroup reading software people should be using. To the comp.lang.python people, i think perhaps it is fruitful now to think about de-coupling the newsgroup from the mailing list... am not very involved in the comp.lang.python or python community in recent years, but my thought is that, i got the feeling that most practical posts happen in the mailing list and the newsgroup ones tend to be more free flow of thoughts... so perhaps de-couple them is good, because python is main stream now and mailing list is sustainable large, is good for more practical, concrete questions and answers, and philosophical free thoughts still have a place to go, in newsgroups. further readings: • Proliferation of Computing Languages xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/new_langs.html • Tech Geekers vs Spammers xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/tech_geekers_vs_spammers.html • Cross-posting & Language Factions xahlee.org/Netiquette_dir/cross-post.html Xah ∑ http://xahlee.org/ ☄ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
