"Dare we count this as a victory for common s...
Cliff Wells · 2011-08-08T18:26:01.290000
"Dare we count this as a victory for common sense?"
Not really. But it is a victory for mob mentality, phony political-correctness, and bandwagon-jumping.
I'd agree that the name was inappropriate. Offensive? Not really, but perhaps somewhere on the same scale as a fart-joke. I'm far more offended by the over-reactions I've read here.
And by the way, no one has bothered to thank Frank for his great work on this and other Python libraries (Momoko is great). Talk about discouraging people from contributing. If he were really the "immature", "childish" person (love the name-calling) he's been labeled here, I'm sure he'd just port his libraries to Ruby and tell you all to go to hell.
This general lameness in the Python community is why I quit comp.lang.python years ago. I'm all for politeness. I'd also agree that the name perhaps took the "upskirt" joke one step too far. Regardless, the backlash here was way out of proportion and pretty damn offensive to me.
BTW, "Python" is frequently used as a sexual innuendo. Someone should get themselves offended by that, for consistency's sake. That is, assuming there's ever been a "politically-correct" person that cared about consistency.
Sorry to carry on here, but I also wanted to addre...
Cliff Wells · 2011-08-09T14:28:13.279000
Sorry to carry on here, but I also wanted to address the "we need more women to open source" crowd.
First off, there's a decent chance that most women simply aren't interested, and never will be.
Secondly, you should stop assuming that what you do is so interesting that women everywhere should drop whatever it is they were previously doing and rush to join you (for free, no less). Programming is largely the task of mentally digging ditches. Sometimes interesting, but mostly repetitive drudgery. Yes, I know lots of people tell you that you're smart, but you aren't. You are simply employed in a field most don't understand, like electrical work or plumbing. Get over yourself and realize that few smart women would want to do this for free.
Finally, you should read the following article to get a different view on why men and women might be differently motivated:
After you've finally digested the information there, please feel free to return to shrieking and throwing rocks at each other. I think we can all agree that it's a lot more fun than programming.
While, unlike Steve, I haven't personally contacted the author, what I'm reading here suggests that she quit open source because of the backlash, not due to some latent guilt over inadvertently using an offensive name.
So, being politically correct (read: rabidly offended), appears to have created an environment hostile enough that it has driven at least one woman away from open source.
I'm curious how many women were driven away from open source by the name itself? Probably zero, but someone should keep score so we can declare a winner.
In point of fact the author left the open source w...
Steve · 2011-08-09T18:18:00.030000
In point of fact the author left the open source world for matters relating to the upskirt package but entirely unrelated to its name - and therefore little to do with "political correctness". But as long as your preconceptions fit your conclusions I suppose you'll keep on making these fatuous comments.
Also I don't really like the implication that driving women away from open source is "winning", but I will assume that's just careless wording.
@Steve
My preconceptions were merely echoes of th...
Cliff Wells · 2011-08-09T19:18:14.796000
@Steve
My preconceptions were merely echoes of those of previous commentators that you chose to left go unchallenged since they apparently dovetailed with your own position.
In any case, having read the author's own page on the topic (which I linked above) wherein she states:
"The whole github-triggered curse has been extremely painful for me. It's by far the worst coding-related experience I ever went through. That made me retire from Open Source."
Since this is in the context of the naming controversy, I cannot see how any other assumption can be made. You can claim superior knowledge since you've personally corresponded with her, but since you are not sharing that correspondence, I fail to see how you can criticize anyone else for using the information that has been made public by the author herself.
My reference to "winning" was intended with extreme irony. I certainly don't consider driving *anyone* away from open source to be "winning", but some people are so bent upon what they see as a larger moral issue that they fail to detect that their own stated goals have been undermined by their abusive tactics.
@Steve
I should also make it clear that my ire is...
Cliff Wells · 2011-08-09T20:23:12.527000
@Steve
I should also make it clear that my ire is mostly directed at a handful of commentators here, rather than at the PSF or yourself.
You and I clearly have a different opinion on what may or not be offensive, but overall I felt that your and the PSF's reasoning was sound. I do feel you used some pejoratives (see the article's title as an example) that could have been omitted, but overall I find your position reasonable.
I feel that differences in opinion are desirable and should not be suppressed, despite the clamoring, fear-mongering, emotion-based appeals of those who choose to be offended by opinions or tastes that do not correspond with their own. Being offended on occasion is part of life. Sometimes it's good for you.
In any case, I suspect the disjoint here is that new contributors to open source often consider their code to be "personal" and made available to those who might want it. This attitude is reflected in Natacha's article (she didn't see it as public since it had only three users). The reality is that they are *publishing* their code, which carries somewhat different connotations and expectations along with an ill-defined set of norms. I'd venture to say that the name was more impolite than offensive and should be addressed as such. If my zipper is down, please don't write a blog article pointing out how childish I must be, but I'd certainly appreciate a quiet nudge pointing out my faux pas.
As Jack Diederich stated in the very first comment, "Positive contributions come by way of example, not by way of punishment."
Incidentally, I'm slightly surprised that "asciiporn" has survived in the Cheeseshop without comment for so long, although personally I find "Bible" to be the most offensive entry there.
@Cliff Wells
Cliff, sorry I didn't notice tha...
Steve · 2011-09-30T03:01:41.676000
@Cliff Wells
Cliff, sorry I didn't notice that your comment languished unpublished for so long. I am talking about the one that began """Sorry to carry on here, but I also wanted to address the "we need more women to open source" crowd."""
You said
"""Secondly, you should stop assuming that what you do is so interesting that women everywhere should drop whatever it is they were previously doing and rush to join you (for free, no less). Programming is largely the task of mentally digging ditches. Sometimes interesting, but mostly repetitive drudgery. Yes, I know lots of people tell you that you're smart, but you aren't. You are simply employed in a field most don't understand, like electrical work or plumbing. Get over yourself and realize that few smart women would want to do this for free."""
Well, now I realize that I am dense as well as mistaken obviously I shall take your advice to heart. Not. In case you hadn't realized it, few smart men want to "do this for free" either. The open source community isn't the world: I doubt that more than one percent of the workforce are employed in information technology. So your assumption seems to me entirely bogus. There's no reason why women IT specialists should be any less interested in open source than men. Unless, that is, you are positing some difference in intelligence or other decision-making dimensions unsupported by the literature. Your Parthian shot was
"""Finally, you should read the following article to get a different view on why men and women might be differently motivated:
After you've finally digested the information there, please feel free to return to shrieking and throwing rocks at each other. I think we can all agree that it's a lot more fun than programming."""
The talk you quote (and let's excuse the absence of any cited evidence on the grounds that it was a talk to the 2007 APA conference, given by someone we might reasonably expect to be well-informed) includes the following gem:
"The opposite result comes with salaries. There is a minimum wage but no maximum. Hence the high-achieving men can pull the male average up while the low-achieving ones can’t pull it down. The result? Men will get higher average salaries than women, even if there is no average difference on any relevant input.
"Today, sure enough, women get higher college grades but lower salaries than men. There is much discussion about what all this means and what should be done about it. But as you see, both facts could be just a statistical quirk stemming from male extremity."
This seems to conveniently ignore the fact that equality isn't about making averages the same, it's about giving people equal pay for equal work. When (a long time ago in a galaxy far far away) I was a bus conductor for Bradford City Transport, it didn't matter a jot to me what the captains of industry were earning. It was, though, a point of some pride that my home town had chosen to pay women just the same as men to issue tickets on public buses, when others were still discriminating.
Similarly I have no issue with someone of demonstrably superior ability earning more money, but when people of greater ability earn less simply because they lack a penis I think it's time to revisit some fundamental assumptions. You don't seem comfortable doing that. I'm not trying to insist that women join the open source community, but I do hope that we can at least see the necessity for equality of opportunity.
To characterize this discussion as "shrieking and throwing rocks at each other" is simply an attempt to diminish its relevance by dismissing it as insufficiently intellectual (a classic male ploy which, though I am no Camille Paglia, even I can discern). Kindly stop being a dick.
@Steve,
First off, I've been a programmer for...
Cliff Wells · 2012-01-23T21:12:48.518000
@Steve,
First off, I've been a programmer for nearly 25 years now, so when I declare it "plumbing", I'm not calling programmers "dense". I am, however, recognizing the false sense of superiority that many in this field experience (I've been guilty of it in the past, so it's pretty easy to spot).
My point isn't that you are dense (despite your attempts to convince me otherwise), but rather that we are perhaps assuming too much when we think that people should somehow desire to become like us. If that isn't arrogance, then I cannot imagine what is. I'm sure that Wall Street bankers feel we are all fools for not striving to be like them, but it seems a large part of the population has no such desire.
The article I linked had nothing to do with "equal pay for equal work", something I think anyone should agree with. It was specifically addressing why "on average" (an almost universally misleading number, btw), men make more than women, a number that is usually bandied about in order to prove that women are being oppressed by men. I do not doubt that there are obstacles for women in any field dominated by men. But to lay blanket claim that the lack of women in a particular field is due *solely* (or even mostly) due to discrimination without some sort of useful data to back it up is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.
But way to throw a straw man at the entire article.
Out of curiosity, were I a woman, would you have told me to "stop being a bitch"?
What a truly pathetic, knee-jerk overreaction.
Th...
Anonymous · 2012-08-06T22:58:11.329000
What a truly pathetic, knee-jerk overreaction.
This male-feminist, lynch-first-ask-questions-later kind of nonsense is infinitely more harmful and childish than any project name.
Why not contact the author(s) first before you throw bile all over the internet? Sometimes communication actually works better than passively shaming and humiliating people. It's the least you could do before you go to the effort to write a post like this.
Do you actually even care about the issue or did you just see it as a way to jump on your soap box and win some fem creds?
Whatever I did, I did openly rather than hiding be...
Steve · 2012-08-07T04:41:25.993000
Whatever I did, I did openly rather than hiding behind anonymity. Those who know me know I do care about diversity of all kinds in open source.
"Dare we count this as a victory for common s...
Cliff Wells · 2011-08-08T18:26:01.290000
"Dare we count this as a victory for common sense?"Not really. But it is a victory for mob mentality, phony political-correctness, and bandwagon-jumping.
I'd agree that the name was inappropriate. Offensive? Not really, but perhaps somewhere on the same scale as a fart-joke. I'm far more offended by the over-reactions I've read here.
And by the way, no one has bothered to thank Frank for his great work on this and other Python libraries (Momoko is great). Talk about discouraging people from contributing. If he were really the "immature", "childish" person (love the name-calling) he's been labeled here, I'm sure he'd just port his libraries to Ruby and tell you all to go to hell.
This general lameness in the Python community is why I quit comp.lang.python years ago. I'm all for politeness. I'd also agree that the name perhaps took the "upskirt" joke one step too far. Regardless, the backlash here was way out of proportion and pretty damn offensive to me.
BTW, "Python" is frequently used as a sexual innuendo. Someone should get themselves offended by that, for consistency's sake. That is, assuming there's ever been a "politically-correct" person that cared about consistency.
Sorry to carry on here, but I also wanted to addre...
Cliff Wells · 2011-08-09T14:28:13.279000
Sorry to carry on here, but I also wanted to address the "we need more women to open source" crowd.First off, there's a decent chance that most women simply aren't interested, and never will be.
Secondly, you should stop assuming that what you do is so interesting that women everywhere should drop whatever it is they were previously doing and rush to join you (for free, no less). Programming is largely the task of mentally digging ditches. Sometimes interesting, but mostly repetitive drudgery. Yes, I know lots of people tell you that you're smart, but you aren't. You are simply employed in a field most don't understand, like electrical work or plumbing. Get over yourself and realize that few smart women would want to do this for free.
Finally, you should read the following article to get a different view on why men and women might be differently motivated:
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
After you've finally digested the information there, please feel free to return to shrieking and throwing rocks at each other. I think we can all agree that it's a lot more fun than programming.
Finally, http://fossil.instinctive.eu/libupskirt/...
Cliff Wells · 2011-08-09T17:38:18.651000
Finally,http://fossil.instinctive.eu/libupskirt/wiki?name=about-the-name
While, unlike Steve, I haven't personally contacted the author, what I'm reading here suggests that she quit open source because of the backlash, not due to some latent guilt over inadvertently using an offensive name.
So, being politically correct (read: rabidly offended), appears to have created an environment hostile enough that it has driven at least one woman away from open source.
I'm curious how many women were driven away from open source by the name itself? Probably zero, but someone should keep score so we can declare a winner.
In point of fact the author left the open source w...
Steve · 2011-08-09T18:18:00.030000
In point of fact the author left the open source world for matters relating to the upskirt package but entirely unrelated to its name - and therefore little to do with "political correctness". But as long as your preconceptions fit your conclusions I suppose you'll keep on making these fatuous comments.Also I don't really like the implication that driving women away from open source is "winning", but I will assume that's just careless wording.
@Steve My preconceptions were merely echoes of th...
Cliff Wells · 2011-08-09T19:18:14.796000
@SteveMy preconceptions were merely echoes of those of previous commentators that you chose to left go unchallenged since they apparently dovetailed with your own position.
In any case, having read the author's own page on the topic (which I linked above) wherein she states:
"The whole github-triggered curse has been extremely painful for me. It's by far the worst coding-related experience I ever went through. That made me retire from Open Source."
Since this is in the context of the naming controversy, I cannot see how any other assumption can be made. You can claim superior knowledge since you've personally corresponded with her, but since you are not sharing that correspondence, I fail to see how you can criticize anyone else for using the information that has been made public by the author herself.
My reference to "winning" was intended with extreme irony. I certainly don't consider driving *anyone* away from open source to be "winning", but some people are so bent upon what they see as a larger moral issue that they fail to detect that their own stated goals have been undermined by their abusive tactics.
@Steve I should also make it clear that my ire is...
Cliff Wells · 2011-08-09T20:23:12.527000
@SteveI should also make it clear that my ire is mostly directed at a handful of commentators here, rather than at the PSF or yourself.
You and I clearly have a different opinion on what may or not be offensive, but overall I felt that your and the PSF's reasoning was sound. I do feel you used some pejoratives (see the article's title as an example) that could have been omitted, but overall I find your position reasonable.
I feel that differences in opinion are desirable and should not be suppressed, despite the clamoring, fear-mongering, emotion-based appeals of those who choose to be offended by opinions or tastes that do not correspond with their own. Being offended on occasion is part of life. Sometimes it's good for you.
In any case, I suspect the disjoint here is that new contributors to open source often consider their code to be "personal" and made available to those who might want it. This attitude is reflected in Natacha's article (she didn't see it as public since it had only three users). The reality is that they are *publishing* their code, which carries somewhat different connotations and expectations along with an ill-defined set of norms. I'd venture to say that the name was more impolite than offensive and should be addressed as such. If my zipper is down, please don't write a blog article pointing out how childish I must be, but I'd certainly appreciate a quiet nudge pointing out my faux pas.
As Jack Diederich stated in the very first comment, "Positive contributions come by way of example, not by way of punishment."
Incidentally, I'm slightly surprised that "asciiporn" has survived in the Cheeseshop without comment for so long, although personally I find "Bible" to be the most offensive entry there.
@Cliff Wells Cliff, sorry I didn't notice tha...
Steve · 2011-09-30T03:01:41.676000
@Cliff WellsCliff, sorry I didn't notice that your comment languished unpublished for so long. I am talking about the one that began """Sorry to carry on here, but I also wanted to address the "we need more women to open source" crowd."""
You said
"""Secondly, you should stop assuming that what you do is so interesting that women everywhere should drop whatever it is they were previously doing and rush to join you (for free, no less). Programming is largely the task of mentally digging ditches. Sometimes interesting, but mostly repetitive drudgery. Yes, I know lots of people tell you that you're smart, but you aren't. You are simply employed in a field most don't understand, like electrical work or plumbing. Get over yourself and realize that few smart women would want to do this for free."""
Well, now I realize that I am dense as well as mistaken obviously I shall take your advice to heart. Not. In case you hadn't realized it, few smart men want to "do this for free" either. The open source community isn't the world: I doubt that more than one percent of the workforce are employed in information technology. So your assumption seems to me entirely bogus. There's no reason why women IT specialists should be any less interested in open source than men. Unless, that is, you are positing some difference in intelligence or other decision-making dimensions unsupported by the literature. Your Parthian shot was
"""Finally, you should read the following article to get a different view on why men and women might be differently motivated:
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
After you've finally digested the information there, please feel free to return to shrieking and throwing rocks at each other. I think we can all agree that it's a lot more fun than programming."""
The talk you quote (and let's excuse the absence of any cited evidence on the grounds that it was a talk to the 2007 APA conference, given by someone we might reasonably expect to be well-informed) includes the following gem:
"The opposite result comes with salaries. There is a minimum wage but no maximum. Hence the high-achieving men can pull the male average up while the low-achieving ones can’t pull it down. The result? Men will get higher average salaries than women, even if there is no average difference on any relevant input.
"Today, sure enough, women get higher college grades but lower salaries than men. There is much discussion about what all this means and what should be done about it. But as you see, both facts could be just a statistical quirk stemming from male extremity."
This seems to conveniently ignore the fact that equality isn't about making averages the same, it's about giving people equal pay for equal work. When (a long time ago in a galaxy far far away) I was a bus conductor for Bradford City Transport, it didn't matter a jot to me what the captains of industry were earning. It was, though, a point of some pride that my home town had chosen to pay women just the same as men to issue tickets on public buses, when others were still discriminating.
Similarly I have no issue with someone of demonstrably superior ability earning more money, but when people of greater ability earn less simply because they lack a penis I think it's time to revisit some fundamental assumptions. You don't seem comfortable doing that. I'm not trying to insist that women join the open source community, but I do hope that we can at least see the necessity for equality of opportunity.
To characterize this discussion as "shrieking and throwing rocks at each other" is simply an attempt to diminish its relevance by dismissing it as insufficiently intellectual (a classic male ploy which, though I am no Camille Paglia, even I can discern). Kindly stop being a dick.
@Steve, First off, I've been a programmer for...
Cliff Wells · 2012-01-23T21:12:48.518000
@Steve,First off, I've been a programmer for nearly 25 years now, so when I declare it "plumbing", I'm not calling programmers "dense". I am, however, recognizing the false sense of superiority that many in this field experience (I've been guilty of it in the past, so it's pretty easy to spot).
My point isn't that you are dense (despite your attempts to convince me otherwise), but rather that we are perhaps assuming too much when we think that people should somehow desire to become like us. If that isn't arrogance, then I cannot imagine what is. I'm sure that Wall Street bankers feel we are all fools for not striving to be like them, but it seems a large part of the population has no such desire.
The article I linked had nothing to do with "equal pay for equal work", something I think anyone should agree with. It was specifically addressing why "on average" (an almost universally misleading number, btw), men make more than women, a number that is usually bandied about in order to prove that women are being oppressed by men. I do not doubt that there are obstacles for women in any field dominated by men. But to lay blanket claim that the lack of women in a particular field is due *solely* (or even mostly) due to discrimination without some sort of useful data to back it up is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.
But way to throw a straw man at the entire article.
Out of curiosity, were I a woman, would you have told me to "stop being a bitch"?
What a truly pathetic, knee-jerk overreaction. Th...
Anonymous · 2012-08-06T22:58:11.329000
What a truly pathetic, knee-jerk overreaction.This male-feminist, lynch-first-ask-questions-later kind of nonsense is infinitely more harmful and childish than any project name.
Why not contact the author(s) first before you throw bile all over the internet? Sometimes communication actually works better than passively shaming and humiliating people. It's the least you could do before you go to the effort to write a post like this.
Do you actually even care about the issue or did you just see it as a way to jump on your soap box and win some fem creds?
Whatever I did, I did openly rather than hiding be...
Steve · 2012-08-07T04:41:25.993000
Whatever I did, I did openly rather than hiding behind anonymity. Those who know me know I do care about diversity of all kinds in open source.Older comments · Page 8 of 8
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