Re: [9fans] Adding a new user on 9-Front

[Kurt H Maier <khm@sciops.net>]

Quoting erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>:

> On Mon Dec 23 17:10:13 EST 2013, sl@9front.org wrote:

> isn't this a false dichotomy?  rudeness doesn't preserve value.

Neither does gladhanding.

> it's easy to point out past mistakes.  do you think these were obvious
> at the time they were made?

Whether they were obvious is too subjective to determine.  They were
(often very loudly) recognized as mistakes.  The problem, as usual,
is that a well-funded mistake is far more likely to succeed than an
impoverished masterpiece.

Obvious?  I'll never know.  But people I respect decried lots of these
decisions at the time they were made.  Without getting into the chicken-
and-egg problem of how I came to respect some of these people, in a lot
of cases, stumbling across an angry netnews missive from a usenet address
I trusted was catalytic in my process of coming to grips with some
understanding of correct software design.

The Unix Hater's Handbook is a collection of articles in this vein; there
are systems eulogized therein which were displaced by the rise of unix,
and whose passing makes me truly sad to have missed out on an era of
computing with real diversity in system design.

This is why harmful.cat-v.org is so important, and it's why I don't have
any interest in suffering fools on internet mailing lists.  If community
is important in guiding software trends, it's important to nip encroaching
macrocultures in the bud; otherwise we wind up with POSIX everywhere, and
an entire generation of computer users who can't even conceive of a world
without it.

People like Blake can present me with bullshit about 'living in a cave' all
day long -- but the surest way to prevent mistakes is to cause people to
defend proposed change within an inch of their lives.  That's the original
point of a thesis defense, and the principal is no less valid on a mail
list.  Most people seem to take such challenges personally;  this is just
because they're not used to being challenged.  It will pass.

khm