Joshua said:
I never claimed it was Sun Java 6.
You implied it was current Sun Java. Current Sun Java is (at this point
in time) Java 6.
Perhaps you didn't intend to imply that.
[snip some technical stuff]
Depends on the change. Also depends on how willing you are to stick it
through.
"Stick it through"? We're talking write some code, do a diff, paste into
an email, hit "send", aren't we?
Or are we discussing some process for getting non-bugfix changes
approved? In which case again, it seems to make sense to get some
backing or some momentum informally first. Including from at least one
person familiar with the formal process to follow afterwards. I am not
that person.
I wasn't a protocol expert when I started working on Mozilla. There's
something called "on-the-job training" or "training by experience."
Improving Java's compiler is not my job, though, so I doubt my employer
would see it that way.
Besides, there are actual step-by-step guides on how to add a simple
feature like "rewrite code that looks like this to this kind of code,"
which describes most of the features you ask for.
I did not know that. And I still do not know where to find such
step-by-step guides, since you didn't bother to give me much more
information about them than that some apparently exist, and since no
obvious search query comes to mind that would be very likely to find one
and very unlikely to have enough irrelevant results as to make the first
real hit be somewhere around page 170.
Except that people synthesize opinions from multiple sources.
Exactly. If the only source they have to synthesize from is Arne, then a
bad outcome results. Ergo, a source opposing Arne's viewpoint has to be
in the mix as well. And unless someone else shows some willingness to
step up to the plate, that source has to be me.
Or you go with option C: just don't care what other people think of you.
Not an option. What other people think of me will affect how other
people treat me. If Arne convinces a significant number of people in
this newsgroup that I'm various terrible things, including a bad Java
programmer, then word might start percolating through the Java sector of
the IT industry that Harold Yarmouth is a bad choice. That might put my
job, and ability to get another job, in jeopardy.
Obviously, I cannot simply stand by and allow Arne to pose such a
threat. Hence I must oppose Arne. The only means at my disposal seems to
be to spread a diametrically-opposite message in the same places he's
spreading his message, and at the same volume level.
And if anyone is formulating an opinion about you based solely on what
other people say about you, shame on them.
Shame on them, indeed, but that would be small comfort if I found myself
flipping burgers because Arne basically had me blackballed. Arne has to
shut up, or his message has to be opposed as described above, one or the
other.
Actually, I find it disturbing that the Internet's design makes it
possible for a single asshole with an ax to grind to hold someone's
reputation, and possibly their job, hostage, and cause them to end up
having to either kowtow to that person or spend an increasing percentage
of their time defending themselves against false accusations.
Only one's boss should have that power, and even then it should be
limited, rather than wielded arbitrarily.
By saying [insult deleted] and stuff
Who's saying insult deleted?
Sorry
OK.
Arne's behavior is wrong, pure and simple. Nevermind that his facts
are wrong.
Then let your behavior show that. Actions speak louder than words.
What behavior? As it is I am being as civil as seems reasonable under
the circumstances, if not more so. However, that is not enough.
* If I go away, my behavior becomes unobservable here. If Arne continues
to badmouth me, his message becomes the sole input to peoples'
opinion-forming process.
* My competence at Java programming is largely unobservable here, since
I rarely post any actual code. So the only inputs to peoples'
opinion-forming process regarding that, all-important bone of
contention is the things being said, by me and by Arne, about it.
* Publicly contradicting Arne makes it clear that I disagree with
Arne. Silence might be taken as no opinion, or even as assent.
* Publicly contradicting Arne is also the strongest punishment
available to me to wield against Arne to send him the message that
his conduct is rude, unacceptable, and will not be tolerated.
Although I've now decided he's been abusive enough to warrant some
mild name-calling directed at him as well.
Let me tell you how I would perceive you if I were a perspective employer:
You appear to be very confrontational and argumentative
You're joking. What is confrontational about any post of mine EXCEPT
posts that were in response to confrontational posts by other people?
I started two threads by posting perfectly civil, non-confrontational
posts. One was full of suggestions that some people apparently didn't
agree would be a good idea. That post was not, however, confrontational,
though many of the responses to it clearly were. The other post was
reporting some undesirable behavior of java.util.Calendar. That post,
also, might only be considered "confrontational" IF you consider any
questioning of How Java Currently Does Things to be confrontational.
There were responses to it though that were quite directly, and even
viciously, confrontational, even some containing personal attacks.
Arne is the most confrontational person here. I am one of the least,
save for the fact that if someone is confrontational towards me, I won't
just lie down and take it without a peep of protest the way you'd
apparently prefer.
Well, regarding your apparent preferences, too freaking bad. I am under
no obligation to make your railroading of me easy for you!
You show a tendency to argue on the abstract and not the concrete
You mean, if I say "X tends to be true when Y and Z but not W", and
someone caricatures my position as "X is always true when Y", I don't
bother to defend the straw man and instead reassert my original claim?
That seems to be a strength, not a weakness.
There is a strong inability to let arguments die.
There is an inability to allow an argument to die *by coming to an
incorrect conclusion*. That is also a strength, not a weakness. If an
argument over some engineering matter arose, and someone is wrong but
also belligerent about it, should I really just let the wrong person
have the final word on the subject, resulting in a wrong implementation
and God knows what consequences down the road, in the interests of
"getting along with people"? Or should I stick to my guns, patiently
explain why Mr. Belligerent (let's call him Barney, say) is wrong, and
insist that the debate continue until there is general agreement to
implement the darn thing the right way?
Which would you prefer to have working for you, the engineer that will
go along to get along even if it means letting the whole thing blow up,
or the one that is willing to stick to his guns if he *knows* that using
a size-X widget instead of a size-Y will make it fail catastrophically?
You call it "insisting on having the last word". I call it "insisting
that if really, only size Y will do, the side favoring size X instead
does not end up deciding the matter by default."
There is also a tendency towards inability to accept that you are
sometimes wrong.
That is incorrect.
There is a tendency to not "accept" that I was wrong in an instance in
which I WAS NOT WRONG.
That is a different matter entirely.
I have not claimed to be never wrong. I have claimed to have not been
wrong in particular instances. And I have been vindicated in several of
those instances:
* The current behavior of Calendar.set() is undesirable.
* ReferenceQueue has a blocking method to poll the queue.
* Public constructors of abstract classes are no more widely usable
than protected ones.
* A Google search for a Java collections library by someone that does
not already know about the Jakarta Commons doesn't find the Jakarta
Commons.
* Javadoc is pointless on method declarations in anonymous inner
classes.
* Enum constants are sometimes implemented as singleton subclasses.
* Dead code in a method should be a warning, not an error.
* An app might have ways of dealing with low memory after the GC has
done its best.
* Requiring a character that can't be typed on most keyboards be used to
access some language feature would be a bad idea.
* Various problems are solved by using immutable objects.
There have been more. On other issues, the jury is still out, or it's a
matter of opinion where reasonable men may disagree. On yet other
issues, there's not so much a disagreement as a misunderstanding, as
when Arne and I were talking past each other because we apparently have
different conceptions of and names for architecture layers. On the core
issue there, that non-constant logic is better off dependency injected
into a lower layer from a higher one than embedded directly into the
lower one, he seems to agree; he just doesn't seem to agree on which
layers are called what and whether this should be treated as one layer
or two, etc.
So you're apparently objecting to the fact that I actually stand up for
myself when I think I've been unjustly accused, wrongly characterized,
or similarly.
I consider such a trait admirable, rather than worthy of condemnation.
Why, apparently, don't you?
Arne: Somewhat confrontational, but also someone who would likely post
for a bit of humor.
The only humor in his posts is of the unintentional variety, usually
induced by a particularly stupid spelling or grammar error.
And not "somewhat" confrontational, "very" confrontational, and also
very much endowed with another trait you incorrectly imputed to me: a
total unwillingness to let go of something even when he's NOT on the
side of truth and justice, but just grinding an ax or expressing an opinion.
Also seems to be someone who refrains from embroiling themselves in
arguments.
That's a joke, right?
He not only embroils himself in arguments, but jumps in with both feet!
Exibit A can be his first post in this thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/msg/70697814b543a4b8
He jumps in to insult The Scuzzbuster, in response to an equally
off-topic post by The Scuzzbuster. The post by The Scuzzbuster doesn't
seem to attack Arne, though it does seem to attack Lew and yourself.
Nonetheless, Arne butts in and blasts it, essentially without provocation.
Emphatically NOT the act of someone "who refrains from embroiling
themselves in arguments".
His next dozen or so posts to this thread are similar. Those are
followed by many in which he argues with "reckoningNNN@google", though
the posts by reckoning seem more provocative of Arne than those by The
Scuzzbuster. (I am given to understand that these two may be the same
person with multiple google groups accounts. I did not bother to read
the large chunk of this thread that started with an irrelevant remark by
Lew and devolved into a flamefest between The Scuzzbuster and half the
newsgroup, until now, when my search for Arne's posts to this thread led
me right into it.)
His first post to this thread NOT aimed at The Scuzzbuster/The
Reckoning/whoever, and also his first actually on the topic of Java, was
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/msg/85eb344a6e106bbc
in which he mangles his English in saying that Roedy's suggestion of
requiring circle-plus symbols and the like to access proposed language
features was a bad idea.
On-topic, and I happen to agree with Arne there. Even so, phrased in a
manner seemingly calculated to get Roedy's back up.
Whether that qualifies as an attempt to pick yet another fight I'll
consider to be undetermined-as-yet. Roedy didn't take the bait, if it was.
Nonetheless, it could have been politer, and it came following a debut
in this thread that involved numerous rude and off-topic posts
consisting largely or solely of unambiguous personal attacks.
Immediately following Arne's reply to Roedy is his first post to this
thread that actually deals directly with anything that I wrote:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/msg/623fbf38edf0646b
But this post is not about Java. It is once again him jumping into a
pre-existing fight. He insults me twice, apparently disliking the fact
that my post had been off-topic, and ignoring the fact that this had
been in response to an equally off-topic post by another person, and one
that had contained factual errors that needed correcting to boot, and
also ignoring the fact that Arne's own post was equally off-topic.
In fact, he has had little to say about Java in this thread and a great
deal to say, none of it good, about various people.
Meanwhile in the Date/Calendar thread, Arne's first post is a question
asked of me. Arguably it's harmless.
His second,
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/msg/86235bd045d1e86a,
starts off on the wrong foot right off the bat with an insulting
insinuation of incompetence on my part.
This was in response to my having said "I have the feeling that
Calendar.getInstance() is not returning a singleton, and that it is also
not zeroing out newly-created instances."
The statement by me was non-confrontational, apparently factually
correct, and in no sense could it be regarded as uncivil or as a
reasonable provocation for Arne's hostile reply. Nonetheless, Arne did
post a hostile reply, and furthermore, his subsequent posts to that
thread largely serve as vehicles for further personal attacks against
me, albeit mixed in with a higher level of Java-related content than in
this thread, and with the odd post that serves some other purpose
instead, such as (again) locking horns with The Reckoning
(
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/msg/60081ddce0ba31ba).
Yet you claim that Arne is someone "who refrains from embroiling
themselves in arguments".
The evidence does not seem to support your contention. Rather the
opposite, as a matter of fact.
He starts fights, attempts to start more, and jumps eagerly into
pre-existing fights to blast one side or the other, and he does so on a
daily basis.
Incidentally what are those star ratings I saw in Google's archive when
researching this to find the above examples and links? (This
newsserver's retention blows; it lacks the starts of both threads
already. Google links are easier to view than raw message-IDs anyway,
though, because you can just click them in any suffiently-modern
newsreader.) If they indicate general sentiment among Google users, it
looks like they don't like Arne very much, and do like me. That also
seems to be inconsistent with your opinions of myself and Arne, though
it is consistent with what the record shows of our actual respective
behavior.
The wisdom of the crowd at work again? If so, then perhaps you should
take heed...
Lew: Someone well-trained in the art of technical writing, although a
bit blunt. Acts somewhat unapologetically towards neophytes.
To the point of starting fights. Also does not let these go once they've
started, but readily perpetuates them. Also given to gratuitously
insulting those he dislikes, for example by always putting my name in
quotation marks whenever he refers to me or even quotes someone else
doing so. That seems intended to imply some sort of dishonesty, and he
does it irrelevantly and pointlessly.
Oh, and then there's his paranoid fantasies, which he's posted two or
three times, accusing me of belonging to some sort of cabal or
conspiracy a time or two.
I would include myself, but there is no way I can do that in an unbiased
manner. Anyone want to provide some various views on this matter?
Like Lew, including the technical knowledgeability, but without the
paranoia or much of a tendency to put irrelevant insults into your posts
or to stray off-topic and then STAY off-topic. Still the tendency to
insult the intelligence or competence of those you disagree with, when
actually disagreeing with them, but without adding unrelated extra bonus
insults the way Lew sometimes does.
Also more willing to concede an argument when evidence turns up that
favors the other side, more willing to agree to disagree and end an
argument without a "winner", and considerably less willing to perpetuate
an argument purely for the purposes of carrying out personal attacks.
In short, considerably better than Lew and *vastly* better than Arne,
behavior-wise, but no Patricia Shanahan.
Consider the above to be a somewhat back-handed compliment, along with
some implied advice for self-improvement.
