Scott Ott writes:

Just a month after Colorado high school teacher Jay Bennish was caught on tape by a student as he ranted against President George Bush, capitalism and the United States in general

But the rant had a large anti-Israel component that was, in my opinion, even more unfair than the anti-US comments. It included that Israel was formed by the West as appeasement to widespread Jewish terrorism and assassination.

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We must bear in mind that the truth is never clear. If it was, no one would ever disagree with us.

We must bear in mind that the more ignorant a person is of a subject, the more receptive he will be to our advice. Every time a person asks a question he has recognised his own ignorance, so it is a commonplace occurrence for a person to know he doesn't know everything.

We must bear in mind that pessimism and defeatism never solve problems, so it is better to be optimistic about whether a person can or will be persuaded of a good idea.

We must not be scared to disagree. People disagree all the time. But this does not make them hurt each other. It is not necessary to force agreement from a child, or worry overly about what he believes. That is his choice.

We should keep a sense of perspective. The worst that could happen is frequently better than the price of intervening.

We must stop thinking of all situations as the parent choosing what will happen. That is the model of a benevolent dictator. And one of the flaws is the enormous pressure and responsibility it puts on the *parent*.

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From the ruby-talk mailing list. Quoting removed, I think it's readable out of context.


How can a (coding) convention be *wrong*, instead of just less useful, less practical?

The same argument applies to other conventions. Why is Sati *wrong*, instead of just a less useful, less pleasant way to live?

Ideas have broad consequences that can't be arbitrarily restricted: they reach out to other fields. The full answer to the Sati case should include whether anything is wrong at all, and whether practical considerations have moral consequences. Those issues are important to the question about coding.

We can even take a dialog about Sati, and then use some of the ideas to argue about coding. Most of them will work just as well about either topic.

Jim: "Sure, Sati sounds horrible to us, but they are accustomed to it, and would be unhappy to live another way. It has practical consequences, like reducing how many women are available to knit, but wealth is only a convenience."Chloe: "Medical textbooks are a kind of wealth, and medicine matters. With less knitting, they won't be able to buy as high quality medical books."

So, back to coding. This medical textbook argument will work great. Some programmers write tools for doing page layouts, and for making diagrams. Those tools help us make better medical textbooks. The more convenient and practical the coding conventions of the programmers, the sooner we will have higher quality medical textbooks.

The idea that medical textbook production is a *practical* issue with *moral* consequences can be transplanted just fine between the two cases: it has reach.

This isn't conclusive, of course. Maybe you don't see the moral value in medicine. But I think it's getting somewhere, to tie those things together. Most of us are probably persuaded by now. And if we were to continue on, about Sati, or coding conventions, we'd continue on in exactly the same way -- discussing medicine -- because it's all tied to the same issue now.

i told Ann i'd hack jack's computer and knock him offline. i asked jack to logoff AIM for 20 sec. so jack logs off and i told Ann i did it. the most amusing thing went wrong: before he left, jack told Ann "Elliot is asking me to logoff for 20 sec. brb"

girl: i love you
boy: i'm not sure if i love you
girl: well, how will you find out?
boy: dunno
girl: will you know soon?
boy: i doubt it
girl: this is important!
boy: why?
girl: i don't love you anymore

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If your child doesn't want to look for solutions, this does not mean your child doesn't want to solve problems. Really. Your child isn't insane and *would* prefer if things were better. What's going on is that previous time spent "problem solving" was unpleasant and was itself a problem. Perhaps because it seemed boring and fruitless. Or because it involved the child being pressured to make compromises or sacrifices (same thing), or lectured, or asked questions he didn't want to answer. Or maybe "problem solving" previously interrupted other things like video games.

True morality isn't unpleasant or burdensome. Moral knowledge is knowledge of how to make choices. It's a tool that has information about how to get what we want, and what we should want. It's not arbitrary or artificially limiting. If something is a bad idea, true moral knowledge on the subject will include reasons why it's a bad idea and explanations of what will actually work well. And they will be persuasive. If they aren't persuasive, that indicates a *lack of* moral knowledge. If the "moral" alternative proposed doesn't sound nice, that indicates a *lack of* moral knowledge (either the proposal is wrong, or the explanation for it isn't good enough).

Syntax is supposed to be a win. It's supposed to be convenient, readable, shorter.

But Lisp -- the language where you write your code in trees without syntax -- is known for being very succinct.

So I see two possibilities:

1) Most syntax isn't actually a great idea

2) Other languages are so handicapped by lacking features found in Lisp that it more than makes up for syntax advantages (and libraries, and all Lisp's other deficiencies)

I'm leaning towards (2), but I suspect a fair amount of syntax is not helpful and some is bad.

Here I stand; I can do no other - Martin Luther