alexandercrohde

I get that.

I'd be quite content to concede renaming master/slave in the linux kernel if that was the end of it. I think what I want to fight against most is the amount of distraction/canceling/fear involved in ever-changing semantic rules. The reason people like me get very hesitant to concede any ground is for fear it would empower even more fear of job security at work (over constantly changing correctness rules).

So you can understand where I'm coming from:

- I worry that this is a slippery slope, and if some places do it, then all places will feel pressure to do it, and be called out on twitter if they don't, and create a huge amount of distraction from actually building good products for the customer

- I worry that this is a slippery slope, and that more words might be included (class, caste, abort, kill, black, white, race, male port, female port, dongle)

- I worry that this is a slippery slope, and that these words in other contexts won't be allowed (mastery, pop culture Britney Spear's Slave4U song, BDSM, Master's ranks in videogames)

(I've seen this in my own lifetime with the word "retard," which used to be the most correct medical term for certain mental deficiencies, and due to a constantly shifting correctness window is now basically worse than "Fuck.")

Now traditionally "slippery slope" is sometimes considered a philosophical fallacy. But perhaps you can say, if the momentum kept going would you be against it? Because if that train didn't stop, I think all the consequences I listed would be much too high a price to pay.

Just to flesh this out a little, suppose my work has 5 Christians, and they all feel "abort" is an insensitive term?

1. Whose opinions count on the issue? Just Christians? All women?

2. Do we take them any less seriously if the motivation seems vaguely political?

I really do understand setting the bar low when everybody is arguing in good-faith. But on anything political, I think it's pretty much a stalemate and we have to recognize there's almost no overlap.

>> The trauma of being asked not to make rape jokes can't be compared to the trauma of being raped.

???

>>> Just do the right thing, is it worth the arguing?

So I think your argument is very all/nothing. There's a whole spectrum of "this thing offends 1 person" -> "this thing offends 100% of people", and we do have to draw a line (is it 20%? 50%?) and not simply label things "offensive."

It's all especially confusing when some people are offended on "behalf" of others. I think oversimplifying this issue is wrong and making this very discussion "unsafe" is also wrong.

>> You don't get to feel ...

I don't think you get to tell other people what they get to feel.

I encourage working on your empathy here. Who gets to decide "what's polite"? What if people disagree? Who gets to decide whose opinion counts?

I don't feel you're arguing in good faith.

We should define "offensive language." How will we measure it fairly? Will we poll the english-speaking and set a thresh-hold?

Because I sure hope we don't find out "aborting" a process is offensive language to religious coders with a polical agenda.

Yeah, I'm curious if he burdens himself with our inane internet opinions (reads it)? Or if people manage to send him emails about it?

So thinking about that... One the one hand, suppose I log into reddit and see police officers clubbing some people drinking beers (this specific instance was in a foreign country).

Yes, on the one hand, I'm just more aware of a bad thing in the world. But on the other, if a million people get outraged watching a clip like that, it seems it does create a "magnification" effect where potentially the outrage is entirely disproportionate compared to crime that isn't brutal and on video (e.g. rich avoiding taxes) but may actually be much more important.

When I read this type of thing, I try my best to look for some basis to decide if it's fortune-cookie-nonsense or great advice.

It's obvious to me that a person can care too much about being/seeming right. But can a person also care too little about it? What is the exact right amount, and how do you know?

>> But what if they fired them solely due to public outcry...

It's interesting to me that this is always put on the outcrier and not the company itself.

Yes there is. What you do is have don't put any IO calls inside your pure functions, but rather pass in their results as parameters.

Keep the impure code and the pure code separated.

One thing I've learned, is that unit testing seems much much more painful than it has to be when you are using too many classes.

When you are writing code as pure functions (i.e. stateless), it's actually much less painful. In the provided example, I would never write a class to curl a website and parse json.

I hate this framing too. I don't understand all the hand-wringing over people losing money in the stock market.

If you want to be mad about people losing money, be mad about the ones where it's rigged against them -- lotto/casinos. Not the ones where they average positive. Hard for me to take this even remotely seriously.