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

[Loïc Hoguin]

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.

It's interesting because you say the writer has to format his email 
keeping in mind how people will read it, in an email that is actually 
much harder to read for me than top posting.

Considering the very large number of clients and possible 
configurations, I find it very odd to blame the one writing the email 
instead of the client being used to read said email. An email isn't a 
PDF, it *will* display differently everywhere. Should I, as an email 
writer, be careful about using the ')' character just because many 
clients will convert it to a smiley? Though I'm guessing your answer 
there is "no because my client doesn't do it and my client is right and 
all others are wrong".

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.

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

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
http://ninenines.eu