CVS at my first job was configured to reject commits containing f-bombs after a spicy debug message sneaked into production and showed up in a children's game.
I thought a user facing error message like this is inappropriate, so politely took the issue upstream [1].
Lennart, who I had spent some time with in real life a few months previous, didn't yet have the reputation for being the person he is today. I thought he'd be pretty reasonable about it. Instead he closed the bug as "won't fix" and left the comment, "Sorry, but please don't waste my time, will you?".
I was pretty shocked by his response, I lost a lot of respect for him at this moment and then wrote a long ass blog post about professionalism of developers and appropriate language for user facing error messages.. but still, Lennart tainted himself and showed the person we now know him as. (Also, if you are reading this Lennart, fuck you).
Ubuntu ended up carrying a patch simply to remove this inappropriate language, I never checked if it was eventually cleaned upstream or if other distros also removed it.
EDIT: I just checked, and it was eventually removed in 2011 [2]
Based only on your post I'm confused. You better a person for including "weird shit" in an error message. But the on a pubic forum tell them "fuck you".
On the basis of profanity alone, your action seems far worse than their's?
I don't think it's funny , but I do feel it's entirely more palatable than "WOOPS SOMETHING WENT WRONG <cute_dog_picture.jpg>" scheme that Amazon and other dotcoms use.
Regardless, the Lennart tirade added into the anecdote really just convinces me that the anecdote is there purely for axe-grinding.
Because it's practically identical to "Something went wrong!" but different and unexpected, which makes it funny. I don't know. Can you really explain what exactly makes something funny?
> Are you, or have you ever been responsible for content end users might see?
Yes. I don't do such things because of curmudgeons like yourself. But as a user I wouldn't mind at all, and think it's funny.
What "reputation"? He's disliked by a very loud minority, the rest of us don't care. I will take someone like Poettering who's actively solving decades-long problems over a useless "professional" any day of the week. He's effective because of his bullish personality.
Either you know about his "reputation" or you don't.
Those that have never interacted with him don't care, I agree (I mean, why would they?). But those that have, i'd suggest is a minority that can tolerate him.. but ho-hum, neither of have statistics on this so we'll never know.
When I met and had discussions with him in 2007 he was mild and seemed to be constructive, i'd suggest his "bullish personality" became more prevalent with time.
I met him once in 2012 and ate dinner with him and Kay Sievers. I agree to your observation about "mild" and "constructive", and will extend by saying that he appeared to me as someone fiercely focused on technical challenges. Therefore the "please don't waste my time" bit further up the thread appears to me totally in character for him. Lennart is really similar to Linus pre-2018 in that regard.
> Berkson's paradox is a false observation of a negative correlation between two desirable traits, i.e., that members of a population which have some desirable trait tend to lack a second. Berkson's paradox occurs when this observation appears true when in reality the two properties are unrelated—or even positively correlated—because members of the population where both are absent are not equally observed.
No, there's a strong correlation between leadership and being bullish. Because in order to get what YOU want done YOU have to advocate for yourself - other people won't advocate for you. Being stubborn is a type of advocacy.
People will claim it's unprofessional, and it is. The problem is that when other's are also unprofessional you can't convince them by being professional.
If you look at who moves up the social ladder fastest and retains their power the longest, they are typically hard-headed people. The have an almost unreasonable amount of confidence in themselves, and in many ways they are delusional.
However, I would argue such a personality is better than being timid. Ultimately, past the computers and the programs we are humans, and human effects come into play. Success is not just measured by correctness; it's measured by perception.
there is no simple way to dissect these inter-related statements, but from my point of view, no. Plenty of people here have dealt with serial abusers, which is being defended as "ends justify the means" above
To be clear there's a far, far gap between being abusive and being bullish. It's quite immature of you to make that leap and use that to paint me as pro-abuse to discredit my argument.
You could instead provide a real argument, not "well what you say is used to defend abusers!"
Yes, and famously Hitler wanted economic strength for his country. I guess wanting economic strength makes you Hitler? ... wait no, definitely not.
I don't have patience for these weak types of arguments. Saying nothing at all is free and easy, I would look into that more if I were you. Seems more your pace.
To be fair, my argument was taken in such a ridiculous and offensive direction I felt it necessary.
It's one thing to think I'm wrong, it's another all together to warp my argument to make me appear crazy. Or pro-abuse. Or whatever. That, to me, isn't in good faith and I quickly lose the motivation to be kind. I work under the assumption the people I talk to aren't stupid, they're aware of what they're doing. I won't extend pity or give people the innocence of a child. In my eyes, that is even more offensive.
He's doing that only because it's his job: his employer has an agenda (i.e. steering Linux fast enough and disruptively enough at a low level, so that serious competitors cannot arise), and he's implementing that agenda without a care in the world.
Would I personally take such a ruthless mercenary over more community-minded folks? No.
Lol, at $work there is a big list of forbidden words, I was not aware of it until I created a pull request containing the phrase "bad packet". Turns out "bad" is in the list, along with stuff like "workaround", "hard-coded", and also a huge list of every slur and vaguely sexual term known to man, some of them oddly specific like "son of a motherless goat". Learned a few new words myself that day...
I remember reading a great story about someone doing embedded development who was doing something like download firmware onto a device and being told "Checksum is bad"...
After much checking it was realised that this was because the checksum literally was 0xBAD....
Why is "bad", "workaround" and "hard-coded" are on the list of blacklisted words? Sounds kind of dystopian; just because you forbid a word from the dictionary or remove it, it does not solve the underlying issue.
My guess is it's about client perception (and perhaps even admission of guilt).
My first encounter with this was as a young developer at an electronics manufacturing company. When discussing a request from a customer to change a particular undesirable behavior of the device, I referred to this as a "bug" in an e-mail to them.
I was quickly reprimanded / corrected, with the explanation that -- while "bug" is a somewhat innocuous term to engineers, to non-engineer types it brings to mind a whole host of bad images, fears, and can lead to canceled contracts under the premise that we've delivered bad-faith product. I was initially very resistant to this idea, but I've seen the wisdom in this as I've matured as an engineer over the past 20 years since this run-in.
For a related example, it reminds me of this issue that was opened on llama.cpp by a user who was concerned that the software had been "hacked":
> Hey, I was reading your Readme.md and I saw that your repo was hacked. I want to ask what this means and wanted to check if the users like me also get the impact of hacking. Or, this is not the thing I should worry about?
Of course, the repo was not hacked -- but the founder of the project mentioned that it had been "hacked together" (as a term of humility / self-deprecation) and some users got the wrong idea of what he meant by that.
So I don't think this is about censorship, so much as good public relations. "Don't spook the horses" -- not all words mean the same things to engineers as people whose perceptions of technology are shaped more by movies and headlines.
Dystopian for sure: I’d wager that if the code-base lives long enough and the pool of developers is large enough, they will start using Newspeak words such as “ungood” or “doubleplusungood” – or other synonyms for “bad” – to work around the blacklist.
You joke, but the phrase "black list" isn't allowed where I work. It contains "black," which has racial connotations. We use "block list" instead. I didn't realize the connection to Newspeak until now
Yes, a lot of dumb little "American political brainrot" like that has been getting pushed in places.
Another example is GitHub changing the default branch name from master to main due to their perception that the existence of a master implies the existence of slaves.
Electronics protocols are getting a newspeak renaming with sometimes humorous results when you see documentation where mass search-and-replace mangled a substring or they forgot to replace the bad words in all caps.
I'm still peeved about the bot that scolded us for the word "Mastercard," which was not only a household name but also an enum value on the wire that payment processing absolutely had to support.
okay so as much as people like to meme on the whole banning blacklist/whitelist thing, it actually makes things clearer to just say blocklist/allowlist, especially for non-native speakers.
People got grumpy about master/slave being replaced with server/client, superior/subordinate, leader/follower, and similar terms but that actually largely benefits as well in that it makes things clearer. Anyone who has dealt with bus protocols that support the more complex "multi-leader" setups or peer-to-peer setups knows how the master/slave terminology can be confusing and potentially limiting in accurately describing the parts of the system.
And the git master/main thing also is more a matter of just making things easier to pick up. Master can be confusing there for the same reasons it's confusing in bus topologies. Main instead is obvious. It's the main/mainline branch of the project. And that also helps set the divide for main vs feature vs maintenance branches (and release tags).
So yeah some of it was done under the guise of politics but that's generally been more about getting an excuse to make the change without people dismissing it rather than the underlying reason for the change to happen.
I tend to not really notice whtever slight cleanliness/communication improvement any of these changes add (this is probably just a me thing).
So, putting politics aside, I don't really care as long as it isn't breaking existing stuff. My only point of contention has been the politics behind some of the pushes.
Aren't blocklist and allowlist strictly better as terms? Black and white (even ignoring the connotations) require at least one level of indirection compared to explicit terms that describe what they are
I actually agree with some of the other commentators that "blocklist" is probably a better term but it’s not easy to start using a new term instead of one I’ve been used to for decades.
In some places, those lists are even more extensive as they include transliterations of profanities in all the various languages the product is ever localized in.
Sometimes this leads to embarrassing issues. I remember one case where a Chinese guy named Hui was unable to make a blog post on his team's official public blog. Turned out that his name was on the list of banned words because of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%85%D1%83%D0%B9#Russian
