Ho, Hum. Another Day, Another Blog Post Critical of Google
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Re: Ho, Hum. Another Day, Another Blog Post Critical of Google
 
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Bonus points for environmentally-friendly re-use of other people's rants, Arlo. On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Arlo Barnes <[hidden email]> wrote:
Doug Roberts
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Re: Ho, Hum. Another Day, Another Blog Post Critical of Google
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Although I must point out that our two ASCII emailers will never see this... On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 3:23 PM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:
Doug Roberts
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Re: Ho, Hum. Another Day, Another Blog Post Critical of Google
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On 03/16/2013 02:25 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
> Although I must point out that our two ASCII emailers will never see this... Actually, I did click on Arlo's links because I could _infer_ the contents of the web pages by the URL, something I have trouble doing with your URLs. >> On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Arlo Barnes <[hidden email]>wrote: >> >>> fASCIIsm - Everything2.com <http://everything2.com/title/fASCIIsm> >>> versus >>> www.textfiles.com/100/whytext.oct >>> >>> -Arlo James Barnes -- glen e. p. ropella http://tempusdictum.com 971-255-2847 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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In reply to this post by Arlo Barnes
Arlo -
How about points for stirring Doug *and* Glen up at the same time? Score! I recently noticed a fASCIIsm yet more extreme. It is not new, but in the light of our whining about whether ASCII should be enough (not unlike whining about the time/clock change?). I call it half-ASCII. When people find it too hard or unnecessary to use Case... and sometimes even punctuation (or correct spelling or grammar!). They only use (much less than) *half* of the ASCII character set. Most recently, it was a woman correspondent who is not merely a regular (and articulate) blogger but is also a published book author. She began her ALL CAPS-SOUNDS-LIKE-SHOUTING message by cautioning me that she was NOT SHOUTING, she just preferred ALL CAPS because it was easier for her to SEE (apparently). None of her books nor blog posts were written in ALL CAPS, so I have to assume that she has "people for that"... copy editors, etc. who can add all the appropriate clues to make it easy to gather. I tried, I swear I did, to not hear her message as shouting... but finally gave over to shoving it all into *lower case* wherein I found her to no longer seem to be belligerent but now rather semi-literate and timid... hmmm.... same *content*, different *form* and it was rather difficult (impossible) to read her message as she must have conceived it... the BELLIGERENT and the _timid_ version just didn't sound like her writing. I finally settled for some mangled average between the two. I was SHOCKED that someone as (otherwise) sophisticated didn't realize the effect of writing in ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME! I even suspected it was a test. In the early days of developing WSIWYG text/graphics tools, I remember the shock I felt that letting people write *rough drafts* with full formatting yielded all kinds of unintended consequences. This was before we fired all our copyeditors and even typesetters... so there were still professionals helping make sure the *final product* was of high quality. Suddenly I found myself reading (for content, not format) my peers' work *formatted* as if it were a finished product (with plenty of formatting errors along with spelling, grammar, punctuation, emphasis, nuance, etc.). It was really eerie! Cognitive Dissonance. I *longed* for a tool that had just enough smarts in it to not allow the rough draft to have any more formatting than straight ASCII, and then gradually introduce more sophisticated formatting as the status of the revisions evolved. I still do... but it ain't happening. I've worked with teams writing together who by convention eschew formatting until after the content is 90% hammered out. I *much* prefer to work with formatted text myself, but don't like the confusion I feel when someone throws me text that is still "stream-of-consciousness" with "stream-of-consciousness" formatting as well as content. Unsurprisingly, I prefer CamelCode style in my code as well. I'll cope with those who like to live in FLAT^H^H^HASCII-Land... and even those in Half-ASCII-Land... it's really only a minor inconvenience. And while I'm quite capable of clicking through a weakly identified link/URL, I also appreciate it when the author/submitter offers a hint of why I would want to, where I might go, etc... - Steve ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: fASCIIsm and half-ASCII users.
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Steve, Perhaps the all caps person is reacting to the work of Archie the Cockroach, who, like e.e. Cummings wrote only in lower case because, unlike e.e. Cummings (presumably), he could only press letters by leaping on the keys one by one. (I guess, if the typewriter had been in cap locks mode when he found it, Archie would have composed his poems in UPPER CASE, like the correspondent we are discussing. Archie’s most famous poem is a paean for the cat’s life, written in honor of and in the voice of his very good friend, Mehitabel, the alley at. I quote in part: I once was an innocent kit my youth i shall never forget By the way, in case any of you are still with me, my (windows) computer stopped doing caps lock willingly, about two months ago. Now, I have to wait 5 seconds for capslock to take effect, and then five seconds more, after I am done with it. Microsoft help files suggest that this small problem can be corrected easily by following instructions that seemed to amount to first hitting my computer with a hammer and then reformatting my hard drive. I wonder if any of you had a less drastic solution. Nick From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Arlo - What are the points awarded/detracted for using other people's arguments? versus -Arlo James Barnes How about points for stirring Doug *and* Glen up at the same time? Score! ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: fASCIIsm and half-ASCII users.
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LINUX. Or, if you prefer,
linux . On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 10:56 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
Doug Roberts
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Re: fASCIIsm and half-ASCII users.
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Administrator
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In reply to this post by Steve Smith
In Praise of Ascii (well, unicode .. but)
There is a very modern, entirely new technology: WYSIWIS What is WYSIWIS you may ask, well What You See Is What I See Much like its earlier sibling, WYSIWYG .. it is a contract between two entities to agree on what is viewed. In WYSIWYG's case, a printer and a computer. Think of WYSIWIS as the same, but between people, the "social" version of WYSIWYG. When I send you unformatted text, we have a chance of having the same visual experience. When one uses formatted text, a very strange phenomenon ensues: they chose a font they like, and it's size, and all is yummy. But alas, my machine hath not this font, nor does it agree on what the size really should be, for my machine hath a Different Notion of what Size might mean. But when using blessed Unformatted Text, all is well because I get to choose both the font and size for they are in My Power, via the Great Configuration of my Device. So gentle reader, you'll see that WYSIWIS is a kindness to all and a Great Way to get along with each other. Amen -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: fASCIIsm and half-ASCII users.
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On 3/17/13 9:03 AM, Owen Densmore wrote:
> So gentle reader, you'll see that WYSIWIS is a kindness to all and a > Great Way to get along with each other. For code, if there is to be standard formatting it should encode information. Like Python and Haskell, not C or Java or JavaScript. Then there is no room for debate about it. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: fASCIIsm and half-ASCII users.
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Python allows the developer to introduce all kinds of interesting indentation errors, as I discovered after moving some blocks of code around. --Doug On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 9:34 AM, Marcus G. Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
Doug Roberts
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Re: fASCIIsm and half-ASCII users.
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Hah and you get perilously close to the long standing battle of spaces or tabs? And if tabs what should the width of a tab be?
The answer, by the way, is just say no to tabs. Spaces all the way. :) --joshua On Mar 17, 2013, at 9:46 AM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:
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Re: fASCIIsm and half-ASCII users.
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I usually let emacs decide the "tabs vs. spaces" issue. Cue the vi vs. emacs war... On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Joshua Thorp <[hidden email]> wrote:
Doug Roberts
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Re: fASCIIsm and half-ASCII users.
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In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2
On 3/17/13 9:46 AM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
> Python allows the developer to introduce all kinds of interesting > indentation errors, as I discovered after moving some blocks of code > around. Right, just like don't ignore the associativity of multiplication and division.. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: fASCIIsm and half-ASCII users.
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Python takes its indentation very personal. On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 4:47 PM, Marcus G. Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
Doug Roberts
[hidden email] ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
Re: fASCIIsm and half-ASCII users.
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On 3/17/13 5:15 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
> Python takes its indentation very personal. > What is the justification is there for having for so many languages? 1) A formatting style that communicates information to human readers, but nothing to the interpreter or compiler. 2) A grammar that is parsed by an interpreter or a compiler. 3) denotational/axiomatic/operational semantics of the programming language 4) domain mathematics It seems to me that any divergence between these is bad. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com |
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