[erlang-questions] [ANN] Positive version 13.3.7

[Joe Armstrong]

Since when is humor toxic?

I suspect that node folks don't actually read posts relating to Erlang
stuff, and even if they did might be amused or more likely puzzled.

When I first saw Jespers post I thought WFT - I didn't think that
figuring out if an integer was positive was a problem and I thought
maybe Jesper has seen deeper into integers than I had imagined,
perhaps figuring out if lazy large integers are positive is undecidable.

Then I read the code and realised it was a joke - so Jesper had fooled
me for the time it took to check his code.

Does satire have to be prefaced by a warning - "might be offensive to
XXXX" the version 13.3.7 might have warned me - can you imagine a world
without satire? I even used to watch Jon Stewart from Sweden of all places
just because he was good at satire - he poked fun at stuff that I had
no knowledge of, but he did have a point of view and that I liked.

I buy the Guardian just to read John Crace whose political commentary
is devastatingly funny and nice to no man. A good critic has a pen
dipped
in venom ... (Google and read John Crace, and you'll get the idea) -
in his hands the pen is a powerful weapon.

I actually like reading stuff from "smug jerks" since this gives me
the opportunity to either agree or disagree - bland text that nobody
could possibly
disagree with is not my cup of tea.

Can you imagine world with no smug jerks? Nothing to get cross about,
nothing to like? Is being called a smug jurk and insult or a compliment?

Many of the funniest writers I know are very definitely smug jerks if
you disagree with them - or brilliant humorists if you agree with
them. The jerkiness is in the eye of the beholder, not the the
beholden.

Viewing software as practised today is potentially harmful - I could react with
horror or amusement to what I see - a lot of what I see stinks so how
should I react? - be angry?, be cross? be pios, be smug. I choose to
be amused. It's a
symptom of our humanity - we muddle through.

Cheers

/Joe






On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 6:17 PM, Sean Cribbs <seancribbs@REDACTED> wrote:
> This kind of thing is unnecessary and toxic. You've just reinforced the
> perception that the Erlang community is made up of smug jerks. Please stop.
>
> Sean
>
> On Thu, Mar 24, 2016 at 12:05 PM, Jesper Louis Andersen
> <jesper.louis.andersen@REDACTED> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm pleased to announce version 13.3.7 of the positive library.
>>
>> https://github.com/jlouis/positive
>>
>> The library solves the extremely hard problem of figuring out if an
>> integer is positive or not. Drawn upon experience from the Node.js and
>> Javascript communities, the necessity of such a library should be obvious.
>>
>> We already have several issues that needs solving, and we have had several
>> pull requests in its short lifetime.
>>
>> --
>> J.
>>
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