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

zxq9 zxq9@REDACTED
Thu Mar 26 12:32:09 CET 2015


On 2015年3月26日 木曜日 12:09:12 Loïc Hoguin wrote:
> On 03/26/2015 11:50 AM, Vincent de Phily wrote:
> > On Thursday 26 March 2015 16:07:03 Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> >> As I moderate no mailing list, my opinions have as much
> >> force as a politician's promise.   But I shall continue
> >> to value inline-annotated messages more highly than
> >> top-posted ones.
> > 
> > It's like going to a job interview badly dressed, punctuating your
> > everyday
> > language with swear words, or leaving lots of grammar/spelling errors in
> > your texts. Some people you speak to won't mind, care, or notice. But
> > many people will notice, and the majority of those will not tell you
> > about it : they'll just tend to disregard you in more or less subtle
> > ways. In the end, it's your problem more than their's.
> > 
> > Top-posting is the spelling mistake of mailing lists. Some readers won't
> > care, and some will find the message annoying and/or harder to
> > understand. If they do, it's the top-poster's loss.
> 
> You say this but you have the same problem as zxq9. In my client your
> "properly formatted email" has line breaks about every 80 characters,
> which results in every second line being exactly one word. It wouldn't
> be like this if you or your client didn't put those line breaks.

Order of lines != Length of lines. Perhaps you have missed this detail. I 
variously use Kmail, Thunderbird, whatever client AU provides on one phone, 
whatever (different) client Willcom provides on another, Mutt, and a web 
interface I don't know the name of. Mail displays very differently in each 
save one point: they all display the lines in order.

While I am not about to run around figuring out how to set all my clients on 
all my devices to format messages for *just* this one list in a way that 
either inserts newlines only when I hit <enter> or cuts them exactly at 74 
characters, I am concerned that the continuity of what I write and what I read 
makes sense.

> It is trivial to detect the rest of an email is just a quote and the
> client should indicate that (it would also be useful for those who do
> quote inline but leave a large quote unanswered at the end), just like
> it should be trivial for my client to change the flow of text to make it
> readable instead of the mess it makes right now.

No, there is a semantic ambiguity here -- until you use your wizardly powers 
to write a mail client that can not only display your mail, but can also 
interpret what its author intended you see. Gmail makes an attempt to roll-up 
quotations in a way that tries to make email exchanges "conversations" instead 
of a series of essentially on-off messages (and Kmail can be made to behave 
this way), but this feature tends to confound the very best examples of point-
for-point discussion I see on lists, be turned off by the user, or only work 
well on Outlook-style top-posted messages.

> I find it fascinating that the code of conduct has only had the opposite
> of the intended effect so far.

I, too, find this rather interesting. It would be nice if we could go back to 
discussing that one thing... what was it... Oh yes, Erlang.



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