I’ve been noticing a depressing trend among some contributors to OS projects. More and more I’m seeing people deliberately saying and doing outrageous things, and then excusing their behavior under the guise “I had to to that to make a point,” or some similar trash.
The idea itself isn’t new, talking heads on TV and radio have been doing that for decades. The theory behind it goes something like this: When the show’s host says something eminently reasonable, the listeners will sagely nod their heads and agree, but no one picks up the phone to call in and congratulate the host on being reasonable. On the other hand, if the host says something outrageous, people will call in by the droves, either to argue vehemently or to cheer the host on into further outrages.
Either way, the phones ring and the host has something to do for the next hour. If the callers are rational, the host backs down from the outrageous claim with the excuse that the hyperbole was necessary to get people thinking. Of course, that’s a convenient fiction, because the host really wasn’t trying to get people to think; the goal was to make people talk, not to make them think.
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OK, so the new Safari (version 5) is out, and it includes a “reader” feature that’s been taking some heat.
The complaints are justified — what it does to links is insufficient for some vision-impaired users, and justified text looks horrible without good hypenation, which Safari doesn’t do, just to name the two most obvious.
But that can be fixed.
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Giorgio Sironi writes about (among other things)his first experience with Rails over at Web Builder Zone:
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
end
Oh thanks, now I’m enlightened. No fields, no scope, no getters or setters. What is going on here? Where is the business logic?
It’s a common enough reaction from Rails newcomers, but it completely misses the point.
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I gave a presentation recently at Web414 that promoted the idea that frameworks were the future of web development. The presentation didn’t go well (It started its slide downhill when I realized too late there would be no way to show my slides. I switched to a more interactive, discussion-oriented presentation, which of course I hadn’t properly prepared for, which in turn only contributed to a further slide.) Still, it served to clarify a little more my thinking on the subject. (Half the reason to make presentations at your local user’s group is to help you view a subject from a different perspective; think of them as “code reviews for your mind.”)
The fundamental point I was making, that the future of web development lies with web application frameworks and not in traditional CMS’s, relies on two rather finely drawn (I cheerfully admit) lines.
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How far can you reach when someone’s behavior becomes offensive? Is guilt by association ever permissable?
Robert Vining, newly minted chief spokesman and admin for All Together As A Whole is finding that out, right now. He writes about it in this blog post.
I’ve been there, Robert. You made the right choice.
In a nutshell, he was told he was going to be removed from helping with the joomla.org forums unless, now that he’s in charge, he bans an individual from an unaffiliated website. (It says “independent” in the tagline, in case you’re easily confused.)
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