waterlion

It's a shame you think that I'm trolling. You're welcome to go back over my comment history and look at the conversations I've engaged in. Sure my comments provoke a range of responses. It would be a boring world if everyone always agreed with everything. Maybe the writing style isn't to everyone's taste. But they're never intended to provoke anger.

My original point was that the absolute application of principles designed to bring about equality could be harmful and that we need to apply contextual understanding to language. If the expression of that idea makes you angry, that's fine, but it's not trolling.

Anyway, I'm bowing out of this thread as it doesn't look like pursuing this idea is constructive.

I was not trolling by the definition I know. I just thought that it might lead to an interesting conversation.

It's just too hard to communicate on the internet, especially with people who don't share your conversational goals. I think I just found a new year's resolution.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that I would want others to extend to me and not accuse you of pedantry. But I don't think there's much steam left in this conversation.

Specifically the casual use of the word 'insane'. I don't think it's unreasonable to discuss the contents of the page and make references to things not contained on the page.

I'm looking for interesting discussion with intelligent people on a range of subjects guided by user-submitted stories. I'm looking for explorations of ideas, learning new things, synthesis as well as derivative ideas. Open-mindedness and acceptance. Otherwise there's no point.

I'm not looking for pedantry and closed-mindedness (I'm not accusing you of those things).

I'm probably in the wrong place for that on HN, but the articles are interesting and often so is the discussion.

It wasn't primarily a joke/10.

I think it adds to the broader discussion that goes on on HN, specifically over the last month or so.

Could you remove that joke about the dog from your profile page please? I went there looking for serious information.

Don't be a joke pedant? The author (me) uses the quotation in an ironic manner.

I was going to say "the equivalent of heteronormative but for mental illness" but I thought that anyone that understood what I was saying might have just let me have that one slip and interpreted the meaning rather than focus on its strict representation.

It wasn't a joke as such, at least its intention wasn't primarily humour. Just highlighting the fact that nearly everything everyone says is offensive or exclusionary to someone and that if we adopt the universal application of the principles of extreme gender-neutral language that we've seen advocated on HN and elsewhere, equally for every issue, we end up with lobotomised language†.

I think the use of 'insane' is fine. And I think the use of gendered pronouns is fine. But I am neither insane nor of a gender that is under-represented in the pronoun

† oh never mind

How do you square that with the article? It specifically says that that Django REST is "insane".

"Django REST framework is an insane framework"

I'm fed up with this kind of oppressive language. This is heteronormative and is discriminatory to the mentally ill. It's stuff like this that leads to the imbalance and under-representation in the industry. Let's boycott this author.

(I would love not to have to write "</satire>" but having seen some of the comments here, I think I need to. I wonder how many white-knights-for-women use language like this without thinking. We need some flexibility in the way people are allowed to express themselves.)

That typeface. Looks a bit like Bank Gothic. Can an American explain the cultural connotations? As a European it has very particular associations. A cross between Real American Hero Military Men With Guns and a certain child-like toy-soldier naïvité (case in point, a computerised machine for killing animals). Not trying to be incendiary, it's quite difficult to define. But people seem unashamed to use it. Is it a cliché?

For a very narrow range of software, I suppose. Not for software that has side-effects and actually does stuff in the real world.

What about software that sends emails to people, or places orders, performs billable work, or gives people directions, or supplies them with data that they then carry forward and use in decisions or in other systems?

And are you proposing that instead of writing tests you write a play-back-able-log system that can roll back state and re-apply transformations if a given component did incorrect things?

I think sensible testing is the way forward, where sensible is appropriate to the type of application, language and requirements. 100% coverage is suitable for industrial code and 1% coverage is appropriate for toy projects. But no tests at all seems foolhardy.

What happens when your customers' data is lost or corrupted because of a bug you could have caught?

I read the headline and skimmed the article. I only realised at the end, when he's trying to sell you something, that the 'we' is inclusive-marketing-speak.

Before that I thought that it was 'we (my organisation) don't write tests, and here's a defence of why', followed by a list of excuses (in which I thought 'I wouldn't touch this guy with a bargepole'). I only realised he wasn't making excuses for himself after reading the homepage.

tl;dr misleading title and confessional writing style YMMV