[erlang-questions] Announcing Erlang.org Code of Conduct

[Vincent de Phily]

TL;DR: repeating previous arguments, not sure how useful it is at this stage 
but hey.


On Wednesday 25 March 2015 08:14:00 Bengt Kleberg wrote:
> To me the good part with top posting is the knowledge that nobody is
> editing the quoted part. A top post where the quoted content is heavily
> edited is not better than inline comments. Again, to me.
> 
> To trawl carefully through the quoted content in a top post message
> looking for added content is futile. If there is more content it is not
> a top post. Just the normal inline comment kind of email.

This email has content above the quote as well as inline. How do you 
distinguish this case from the "top-post with pristine quote below" case ? Or 
did you not read past my first sentence (and therefore assume that I was 
accusing you of repetition instead of myself) ?

The fact is that you never know what quoting convention has been used, so you 
always need to check through the whole thing. Hopefully your mailer gives a 
visual indication of what is a quote so that the check is very quick, but it 
still takes time. And if the post was the "include everything without touching 
it" kind, which provides no information that isn't already contained in the 
threading and the archives, this is wasted time.

> There might be statistics that show how top posters write with less
> effort than inline commentors. That I have not heard of it does not
> prove anything. But I much prefer a effortless email that is helpful, to
> a carefully quote edited message where lots of effort has gone into
> being unhelpful and unpleasant.

We all prefer helpfull messages. And the effort that has gone into writing a 
message hopefully correlates with the helpfullness of the message to the 
reader. Inline quoting accounts for a very small fraction of the message-
writing effort, and is IMHO well worth the increased readability.

> To be clear, the unedited quoted contents below are both helpful and
> pleasant.

Can't argue against subjectivity. To me, the contents below were completely 
useless, and therefore unpleasant.

-- 
Vincent de Phily