Erlang vs. Java

[Dustin Sallings]

On Sep 12, 2005, at 1:52 , Joe Armstrong (AL/EAB) wrote:

>   I disagree - it *is* a valid comment - and it is a statement of fact
>
>   Richard said "I found it difficult to read" - the consequence of  
> this will be
> that he presumably not read the page unless he is not well  
> motivated to do so.

     First, let me apologize for perpetuating this thread digression,  
but there's a subtlety that was missed in here:

     1)  He said it's hard to read, but didn't give much of an  
indication as to how it was difficult to read.

     2)  In a private message, he described what the page looked like  
to him, and it was not what was specified (``In this year's Mozilla,  
it prints as pale grey on white.'').


     For #1, I don't believe it's constructive to tell people that  
something is bad and point them off at endless volumes of information  
about what is good hoping they'll spend time absorbing all of it and  
realize what small mistake was made.  It's just not that hard to say,  
``I have trouble reading this because of the low contrast between the  
grey text and the white background.''  At that point, it would've  
been obvious that something wasn't working correctly.

     For #2, this sounds like user error.  The web page specifically  
called for a black background, which is how it was rendered on my  
screen.  In order to get the background to be white, one would have  
to either be using a browser that doesn't understand web standards,  
or one would've had to have partially overridden what the designer  
had requested.  Perhaps there are other possibilities, but I don't  
know what they were, because no further information was given.


     So, in summary, when I said it's not a valid complaint, perhaps  
I should've said it's not a constructive complaint.  From what I've  
been able to gather after the initial complaint, it sounds more like  
user-error, which (I would say) would make it a completely invalid  
complaint.

     Sorry again for dragging this along.  The java discussion was  
somewhat interesting at the beginning, at least.

--
SPY                      My girlfriend asked me which one I like better.
pub  1024/3CAE01D5 1994/11/03 Dustin Sallings <dustin@REDACTED>
|    Key fingerprint =  87 02 57 08 02 D0 DA D6  C8 0F 3E 65 51 98 D8 BE
L_______________________ I hope the answer won't upset her. ____________


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