Re: Quoting styles, cont (Was Re: Fonts in GTK)
Rob Ransbottom wrote:
> If one watches for how misunderstandings occur and expand
> one can write so as to minimize them.
As someone once said, "You sadist! You're asking people to THINK!"
Much as I agree with everything you wrote, I think you're wasting your
breath. Written conversation is not really the sort of thing that most
people want to analyze and learn how to do better. In my experience,
most programmers can't be bothered to learn how to improve their coding
style so as to avoid certain common classes of bugs, and that's their
_job_, for which they presumably studied at university level. So how can
you expect the average mailing list subscriber -- someone who has not
been trained in problem solving -- to appreciate the sort of
engineer's-mindset arguments you're advancing?
The very idea that communication is a two-way street is strangely foreign
to most people, as far as I can tell. The general attitude seems to be,
"Well, what I said made sense to me, so there's something wrong with you
if you didn't understand it." Not everyone with this attitude is an
idiot either, at least, clinically speaking.
Craig
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