You know, this really sucks for me personally. Not the ban, but the sorts of things Eric appears to stand for. I read The Cathedral and the Bazaar when I was 13, and it was probably my gateway into advocating for open source. Somewhere around that age, I ended up speaking on a panel, among other OSS advocates, that successfully sold one of the local school divisions on OSS (we also helped them integrate it, on-site :). To be honest, I don’t quite remember the book or quite what I thought of it, but I know it had a profound influence on me at the time.
Then I see Eric write this:
> Usually (and in this case) accompanied by a lot of bafflegab about “inclusion” and “diversity” so thay anyone who isn't a fan of the new, censorious rules can be cast as some sort of bigot.
:/ Eric, we can have it both ways. I hammer it home into the engineers I’ve lead that code is the ultimate source of truth. I‘ll guide them from, for example, “do we need a mutex here” through to object code to generated assembly through to an intel reference manual, because I want to demonstrate that as engineers, we are in full control of our creations. The engineers I work with all challenge each other, and ask difficult questions, and put ideas through difficult tests. Because we’re mature adults, we can do so with language more advanced than “this is shit” (an open source favorite). It’s real easy. How about, “what happens when <state concern>” or “have you considered <alternate approach>”.
In fact, by soliciting more feedback and criticism, you are being more inclusive - as long as the conversations play out in a constructive way! Yes, it can be hard to teach that, but that’s why we pay people managers and technical leads to do a job.
Honestly, though, what sucks most of all is when you see that people who were so influential to you early in life would apparently look down on the person you are, just because you would ask to be respected in return.
You are taking what he wrote out of context and interpreting it to mean something very different than what he intended.
Eric is not arguing that insults are preferable to dispassionate feedback. (As I noted in another comment upthread, I have worked with him on a small part of one of his coding projects, and in that context he is all dispassionate feedback and no insults whatever. So in actual work he does not exhibit the bad behavior you describe at all.) He is looking at what is being done to OSI, and what is being done to open source projects around the world, in the name of "social justice", and he sees the same game being played that has been played by the Left for centuries to gain control of institutions and then completely subvert them from their original purpose. If you don't understand that historical context, of course you're not going to understand why he is being so forceful about this. He is not trying to stop people from being constructive and non-insulting about actually writing good code. He is trying to stop people whose ultimate agenda has nothing to do with writing good code from taking over open source projects and ruining them, making us all much worse off in the process.
> and he sees the same game being played that has been played by the Left for centuries to gain control of institutions and then completely subvert them from their original purpose
"""Out of context""" that looks REAL similar to a certain other group that seems to be making a name for themselves in this thread. Glad to know he's a conspiracy theorist and so are his current followers.
> that looks REAL similar to a certain other group that seems to be making a name for themselves in this thread
Which other group are you referring to? If you're going to make charges of conspiracy theory, then you shouldn't use innuendo. Just come right out and say what you mean.
> he sees the same game being played that has been played by the Left for centuries to gain control of institutions and then completely subvert them from their original purpose. If you don't understand that historical context, of course you're not going to understand why he is being so forceful about this.
To be clear, the historical context for this point is that this is a Nazi conspiracy theory ("cultural Marxism") that posits left-wing Jews sought (and continue to seek) to subvert academic institutions.
> the historical context for this point is that this is a Nazi conspiracy theory
Um, what? I don't know where you're getting this from. The historical pattern I refer to, as I said, goes back centuries. And the subversion of academic institutions, for example in the US during the 1960s, had nothing to do with Jews.
Then I see Eric write this:
> Usually (and in this case) accompanied by a lot of bafflegab about “inclusion” and “diversity” so thay anyone who isn't a fan of the new, censorious rules can be cast as some sort of bigot.
:/ Eric, we can have it both ways. I hammer it home into the engineers I’ve lead that code is the ultimate source of truth. I‘ll guide them from, for example, “do we need a mutex here” through to object code to generated assembly through to an intel reference manual, because I want to demonstrate that as engineers, we are in full control of our creations. The engineers I work with all challenge each other, and ask difficult questions, and put ideas through difficult tests. Because we’re mature adults, we can do so with language more advanced than “this is shit” (an open source favorite). It’s real easy. How about, “what happens when <state concern>” or “have you considered <alternate approach>”.
In fact, by soliciting more feedback and criticism, you are being more inclusive - as long as the conversations play out in a constructive way! Yes, it can be hard to teach that, but that’s why we pay people managers and technical leads to do a job.
Honestly, though, what sucks most of all is when you see that people who were so influential to you early in life would apparently look down on the person you are, just because you would ask to be respected in return.