[migrating discussion to groff list, as bug-groff is mainly a reflector for Savannah traffic, which this isn't]
At 2024-01-14T19:31:43-0500, Steve Izma wrote: > On Sun, Jan 14, 2024 at 05:23:28PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > I pretty much do, yeah. Every crazy feature we keep dragging > > along with us makes the language harder to acquire, remember, > > and work with. Where the size of the impacted user community > > is small, as it surely is here--I fear the most prolific users > > of drawing escape sequences outside of macro packages or > > preprocessors are cargo cultists--it seems an easy choice to > > make. > > I agree that this should be fixed. But I can't imagine any > situation where the current behaviour can be considered a > feature. It's more likely that everyone using to the \Z'' fix is > doing so as a workaround and any such documents would be > unaffected by improving the \D't' behaviour. That appears to be the consensus view. [rearranging] > There are scads of situations where one doesn't want to bother with > macro packages, e.g., one-page posters, flyers, announcements. I've > probably made hundreds of them with groff. Those are the kinds of > situations where one draws lots of lines and where this bug becomes a > nuisance. Right. I'd like to serve those users better. > I don't understand your reference to "cargo cultists". > The term "cargo cult" is almost always used in a pejorative way. I'm employing it in this sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming ...and I do mean it pejoratively. > But I've been to Vanuatu and it's clear to me that the real history of > cargo cults is a history of anti-colonial movements that engaged in > communal, ritualized resistance, not so-called superstition. That's a fair point. Colonized societies experience wealth extraction-- that is the point of establishing a colony in the imperial sense--and consequently tend to focus their citizens' attention on material realities. When a superstition is costly in terms of physical resources, it faces strong selection pressures in such an environment. (If nothing else, colonial administrators will eventually receive word of such displays, and the shrewder among them will start wondering about the opportunity costs, and the wisdom of foregoing a redirection of equivalent value back to the imperial hub in London, DC, Moscow, or Beijing.) By contrast, programmers in highly capitalized firms paid to bring to market the next thing their manager characterizes as a "revolution" work in a resource-rich environment but are are taught to emphasize "velocity" over mastery.[1] Mastery remains valued as a social currency among the laborers, however, with the predictable game-theoretic consequences of reducing the overall supply of it to benefit those who already possess it[2], and substitution of other indicators as (ultimately unreliable) proxies. Many of these can be summarized as "at every opportunity, favor the implication of great expertise over its demonstration". Thus, I'd argue that professional software engineers are far more prone to cargo-cult superstition than any population of Pacific Islanders. And I'm envious of your experience in Vanuatu. I haven't gotten even as far as Port Moresby! Regards, Branden [1] and promises of future compensation of potentially zero value (bonuses and stock options) over salary increments [2] I would term this the "Goldfinger" technique, recalling the film's stratagem of rendering useless a large stockpile of a valuable commodity one doesn't own to increase the value of that which one _does_ possess. It's unwise to assume that a founding CTO or VP of Engineering is more brilliant in any meaningful way than someone hired two years down the road. The former was simply "there first", which often means they started out with more capital or had better connections...or both. When one purchases a degree from a prestigious academic institution, the prospect of a network of people with whom one can exchange scratched backs is the value one is bidding to acquire, not a superior specimen of the thing we term "education". For more on this and "meritocracy" generally, see Chris Hayes, _Twilight of the Elites_, Penguin, 2012.
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