documentation for ruby?

[Mark Wilden]

On a mailing list and in most newsreaders you only see one message
body
at a time, especially when you "fetch unread" often. In that case it
does make sense to quote the immediate sentence you are replying to.

Probably. However, consider the history of written communication. When
people wrote letters to each other, or to newspapers, they didn't
usually quote. There's another technique, which incorporates context
into your reply.

I actually spent about a month not quoting anything. No meaning was
lost. But it was much harder work, so I can see why (brief) quoting is
better.

But we do! Watch any talkshow: So Mr A basically said that B sucks. I
concur. Whats your opinion, Mr C?

First, this forum/newsgroup is not a talkshow - it's a time-extended
conversation. People just talk, sometimes to each other, sometimes
over each other. And even in a talkshow, as when a newsperson is
interviewing multiple people at a time (which I think is what you
might be referring to), the entire previous conversation is not
repeated every time someone has something to say.

Imagine a conversation like this:

A: I like ham

B: You like ham. I agree, especially with eggs

A: I like ham and you said that I like ham and then you agreed, adding
that eggs are good with ham. I don't like eggs, though.

B: You like ham, and I agreed, adding the part about the eggs, and
then you...

That's what a typical overquoted Usenet thread is equivalent to.

///ark

 

[James D. Maher]

As a matter of personal preference, I prefer what seems to be called
"top posting".

While reading, if I've been following a thread, I like to see the new
info first. Replies are often brief and my old eyes sometimes have a
hard time finding where the quoting ends and the reply begins. If I
haven't been following the thread but get interested, I consider it my
responsibility to do the homework and get caught up on previous posts in
the thread.

While replying, I try to write whole sentences that are reasonably
self-explanatory. I usually include (at the bottom) the particular post
that I am replying to - snipped for brevity - just for context.

Point-by-point replies seem understandable to me with inter-posting.
But I still prefer complete sentences and self-explanatory replies.
Again, the quoting simply provides context and is only scanned, not
re-read.

Of course, now I've gone and contributed to a bigger problem - thread
hijacking!




j

James D. Maher
J.D. Maher & Associates, Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Dober [mailto:[email protected]]=20
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 10:07 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: documentation for ruby?

Many others don't mind it either way, and if the quote trail is long, prefer
top posting. I don't know where the anti-toppers always seem to feel that
they can speak for everyone else.

I have never seen anybody plead for top posting, I have however very
often seen people asking kindly or humorously to bottom post.
If you prefer top posts that seems to be unlucky for you especially as
you did not ask either kindly nor humorously.
I however do not take any offense and I was not speaking for others
but transmitting information gathered over the years.
Please go through the trouble of looking at the common posting scheme
and what happens when somebody is top posting.

Please note also that nobody ever has been agressed when kindly asking
not to top post, as it just happened to me I am afraid that maybe I
was not kind enough, if this is the case all my apologies.

It however remains my intimate conviction that bottom posting is the
accepted standard on this list, but if all of those who prefer top
posting speak up, things might change.

Cheers
Robert

--=20
http://ruby-smalltalk.blogspot.com/

 

[Todd Benson]

I don't know of anyone who prefers top-posting.

It's funny. Friends and acquaintances do this all the time to me,
sometimes with conversations a year old and no reference to stand on,
or barely five minutes old with my _entire_ sent mail tacked on at the
end (sometimes as an attachment, ugh!).

It seems to me we're mostly on the same page. I still lecture my
friends to please at least make an attempt to bottom post for your
shorter replies, and resort to essay replies (put them wherever you
want) for thorough critiques and the like

Todd

 

[Mark Wilden]

commonly accepted guidelines, as described here:

http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855

These guidelines are not commonly accepted.

I disagree also with one of them in the RFC: always apologize for
cross-posting. That makes no sense. If in a particular case it's bad
to cross-post (and it often is), then just don't do it. If it's not
bad, what's there to apologize for?

///ark

 

[Mark Wilden]

Condensing what has been said by somebody else actually is a honored
practice. Summing up the state of affairs (in spoken conversation)
helps
focusing on what is being said by all parties and avoids the nasty
habit
of getting side-tracked in minutiae or mired in tangents.

It may be an honored practice, but it doesn't usually happen because
it's not usually necessary. See my example about ham and eggs.

Consider that not every one is a) using a threaded email client, b)
follows all threads all the time, and b) most people skim before they
read (information filtering is a survival tactic).

I've already read what's been quoted. Since I read a -lot- of email, I
generally read it no more than a day ago (I can't let things pile up).
I don't need to read it again. All I need to know is what, generally,
the guy's talking about. Most of the time, I can get that from what
he's saying (plus my capacity to remember past events). If not, the
subject line is usually enough. There is no need to recapitulate the
entire conversation.

I also skim before I read. But what I skim is the new stuff, not the
old stuff. If I have to scroll to do that, it makes me cranky.

Just top posting might (*might*) be acceptable in a business/one-on-
one
conversation, but is considered rude otherwise

Begging the question.

Which is especially aggravating if it is a rather high signal / noise
ratio (i.e. an AOL following a screen or two of content).

It actually sounds like we're in basic agreement. If people would only
trim properly, this would be a non-issue (as far as I'm concerned).
But I see a lot more knee-jerk responses to top-posting than to excess
quoting.

///ark

 

[Mark Wilden]

Yes. It's a group discussion. You go to the bathroom during it, and
someone should reiterate for you what had been said.

That's rare. Not to mention irritating. And if I'm in that situation
and had the ability to play back what I missed without intruding on
the conversation, I would. And I certainly wouldn't expect people to
assume that I went to the bathroom after each sentence.

I'm certainly
against verbose quoting (I try to snip as much as possible), but to
follow the thread easier, sometimes I like to see things without
having to scan through deleted emails or worse, jump to the archive
site for the original post.

My mail reader has a search function. It also has the ability to sort
deleted messages by date and subject. I can search Google Groups with
a single keystroke. It's pretty simple, really. But the main thing is
that I tend to remember what's been said. I guess I should appreciate
it when people repeat the entire conversation to me each time they
have something to add, but I don't.

I think someone said it on this list in a humorous way a short while
back; I forget who...

"- Because it's makes sense.
- Why should I bottom post?"

I was waiting for someone to quote that. It would be apt if a
single email message was a conversation. It's not. The thread is the
conversation.

On a side note. Most of my non-techie friends consistently top post
(with the added "benefit" of enclosing at the bottom a non-related
email I sent them weeks ago), so maybe it has a lot to do with who is
talking and what about.

It's pretty obvious why that happens. Their mail client is set up to
automatically quote, then puts the cursor at the top. It's not a
conscious choice.

But I guess I should repeat this another time: I'm not in favor of top-
posting. I think that when quotes are trimmed, it doesn't much matter,
but I guess bottom-posting makes sense. If quotes aren't trimmed, top-
posting is easier to read. Quotes should be trimmed.

///ark

 

[Mark Wilden]

On May 27, 2008, at 9:41 AM, Phillip Gawlowski wrote

last but not least, Outlook starts a new
reply at the top of the quoted text (and it is *extremely* difficult
to
change that behavior).

Yeah, that Page Down key's a real bitch, innit?

///ark

 

[Mark Wilden]

What proportion of posts (or posters) are top-posting? Less than
10%, I am sure, and probably less than 5%. By this measure at
least, top-posting is non-standard.

I don't think that's true, but I don't have any firm evidence either
way. I also said that no one prefers top-posting, but then James
provided a well-reasoned explanation for such a preference. So don't
listen to me.

Or you could care less.

Grrrrr.

///ark

 

[Avdi Grimm]

My personal opinion:

1. Top-posting is rude and bad form in a technical forum.
2. Most of the advocacy for bottom posting I've seen is rude and
dismissive. See point #1, for example ;-)

--
Avdi

Home: http://avdi.org
Developer Blog: http://avdi.org/devblog/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/avdi
Journal: http://avdi.livejournal.com

 

[Joel VanderWerf]

My personal opinion:

1. Top-posting is rude and bad form in a technical forum.
2. Most of the advocacy for bottom posting I've seen is rude and
dismissive. See point #1, for example ;-)

Well put.

 

[Todd Benson]

2. Most of the advocacy for bottom posting I've seen is rude and
dismissive.

This point I agree with, because the advocacy part comes across as a
little selfish.

I still evangelize it, though, as subtly as I can

 

[Gareth Adams]

Or you could care less.

Maybe I'm missing some irony or sarcasm here, but I see this mistake a
lot too.

If you *could* care less, then you already care a certain amount.
However the intention is to indicate that you care the minimum amount
possible, and therefore you *couldn't* possibly care less.

So, OP was correct.

Gareth

 

[Phillip Gawlowski]

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Mark Wilden wrote:

| Yeah, that Page Down key's a real bitch, innit?

Never underestimate the power of defaults. Do you think it is due to
Windows' technical superiority that MS owns the desktop OS market?

- --
Phillip Gawlowski
Twitter: twitter.com/cynicalryan
Blog: http://justarubyist.blogspot.com

~ You can present the material, but you can't make me care.
-- Calvin
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[Phillip Gawlowski]

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Mark Wilden wrote:
|
| I've already read what's been quoted. Since I read a -lot- of email, I
| generally read it no more than a day ago (I can't let things pile up). I
| don't need to read it again. All I need to know is what, generally, the
| guy's talking about. Most of the time, I can get that from what he's
| saying (plus my capacity to remember past events). If not, the subject
| line is usually enough. There is no need to recapitulate the entire
| conversation.

That's good for you. But 6 billion people aren't you. Do you apply your
standards to everybody? Assumptions that work for you do not work for
everybody.

A crude example: Do you speak Chinese, where everybody else speaks
German, while insisting that the language doesn't matter, it's all words
anyway?

Do you shop for groceries, naked?

|> Just top posting might (*might*) be acceptable in a business/one-on-one
|> conversation, but is considered rude otherwise
|
| Begging the question.

Not at all: http://fallacyfiles.org/qbanalog.html

It is not an analogy, but juxtaposing two different styles.

- --
Phillip Gawlowski
Twitter: twitter.com/cynicalryan
Blog: http://justarubyist.blogspot.com

~ "All this modern technology just makes people try to do everything at
once."
- -Hobbes
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[Robert Dober]

Really, I am quite surprised that some people interpret it like that,
but I will definitely try to be yet nicer the next time
Cheers
Robert

 

[Mark Wilden]

| I've already read what's been quoted ...

That's good for you. But 6 billion people aren't you. Do you apply
your
standards to everybody? Assumptions that work for you do not work for
everybody.

I'm talking about how my mind works, and why I feel the way I do. I
think it's logical. If you think my statements aren't logical, please
say so. For example, you may think that when you read a post here, you
do not actually remember the previous post in the thread. I doubt that
very much, but it's possible.

Also, remember that I'm not prescribing anything (I've made that clear
several times). Unlike the anti-toppers, I'm not telling people what
to do. I wish people would trim quotes. I wish people would not
declare something a 'standard' that is clearly not. Other than that, I
don't much care.

A crude example: Do you speak Chinese, where everybody else speaks
German, while insisting that the language doesn't matter, it's all
words
anyway?

"Everybody" doesn't think top-posting is an issue. Nor does
"everybody" consider bottom-posting a "standard." And I really don't
know what you're analogizing to with the phrase "it's all words
anyway". Is anyone here saying anything remotely like that?

|> Just top posting might (*might*) be acceptable in a business/one-
on-one
|> conversation, but is considered rude otherwise
|
| Begging the question.

My understanding of the term is where you argue about something in
terms that presuppose the issue has already been decided. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
. But I'll amend my criticism to "bare assertion." Also, it's
very tricky to use the passive voice in this context. "Is considered
rude" by whom? That's one of the cruxes of this discussion.

///ark

 

[Todd Benson]

Really, I am quite surprised that some people interpret it like that,
but I will definitely try to be yet nicer the next time
Cheers
Robert

An interesting thing about using languages like Ruby is that we
sometimes require a little convention. I think many people on this
list, especially myself, use that for netiquette on forums as well.
I'm still learning proper this and proper that -- something certainly
not static -- but I generally see benefit in people speaking a similar
dialect So, I go along for practical reasons, not always technical
ones. (I've disagreed with the Ruby masters a couple of times about
other things, and then felt embarrassed about it later; ah well).

I'll mention one more thing, too, about the topic -- and someone may
have beat me to it -- is that my eyes work quite a bit faster than my
fingers do (recognizing paragraphs that I've seen before with a single
glance, for example), so repetition of previous statements doesn't
really bother me. It is more important to me with how it's laid out,
so I can quickly figure out how deep in the thread I am, and who is
responding to who.

Personal preference, I guess.

Todd

 

[Phillip Gawlowski]

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Mark Wilden wrote:

| I'm talking about how my mind works, and why I feel the way I do. I
| think it's logical. If you think my statements aren't logical, please
| say so. For example, you may think that when you read a post here, you
| do not actually remember the previous post in the thread. I doubt that
| very much, but it's possible.

The answer to that is a resounding 'depends'. In 80% of cases, I have to
refer to inline quotes (or, in the worst case, a preceding post), since
I do not devote the majority of my brain cycles to email.

At the moment, I have more attention diverted to email, since I am
waiting for correspondence. There are weeks, though, where email (and
IM, or any form of communication) is on the back burner, getting minimal
attention, as it otherwise would distract me. I suspect, I'm not the
only one who works that way.

| "Everybody" doesn't think top-posting is an issue. Nor does "everybody"
| consider bottom-posting a "standard." And I really don't know what
| you're analogizing to with the phrase "it's all words anyway". Is anyone
| here saying anything remotely like that?

Yes, you are implying that. 'It's all the same to me', to paraphrase
your stance.

| My understanding of the term is where you argue about something in terms
| that presuppose the issue has already been decided. See
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question . But I'll amend my
| criticism to "bare assertion."

It's more than 'bare assertion', if those socialized with netiquette
take the 'top-posting isn't the best way to use written correspondence
on the web' ad here to this de facto standard. Of course, it is only
etiquette. However, those that don't follow etiquette are seen as rude
by those who don't follow the etiquette.

Much like farting during dinner is, in the proverbial polite company,
frowned upon.

| Also, it's very tricky to use the
| passive voice in this context. "Is considered rude" by whom? That's one
| of the cruxes of this discussion.

Let's see: a good chunk of the Monks of the Scary Devil Monastery,
large parts of the Tom Clancy newsgroup (at least back when I was active
there), and at least 2 people voicing their opinion in this very thread.
this goes beyond 'bare assertion', but constitutes a trend.

- --
Phillip Gawlowski
Twitter: twitter.com/cynicalryan
Blog: http://justarubyist.blogspot.com

~ A voice crackles in Calvin's radio:
~ "Enemy fighters at two o'clock!"
~ "Roger. What should I do until then?"
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[Jeremy McAnally]

I top post because Gmail sets it up that way when I hit reply.

This is a fine bikeshed, but let's please get back to Ruby. This
isn't my-usenet-nitpicks-talk.

--Jeremy

As a matter of personal preference, I prefer what seems to be called
"top posting".

While reading, if I've been following a thread, I like to see the new
info first. Replies are often brief and my old eyes sometimes have a
hard time finding where the quoting ends and the reply begins. If I
haven't been following the thread but get interested, I consider it my
responsibility to do the homework and get caught up on previous posts in
the thread.

While replying, I try to write whole sentences that are reasonably
self-explanatory. I usually include (at the bottom) the particular post
that I am replying to - snipped for brevity - just for context.

Point-by-point replies seem understandable to me with inter-posting.
But I still prefer complete sentences and self-explanatory replies.
Again, the quoting simply provides context and is only scanned, not
re-read.

Of course, now I've gone and contributed to a bigger problem - thread
hijacking!




j

James D. Maher
J.D. Maher & Associates, Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Dober [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 10:07 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: documentation for ruby?

Many others don't mind it either way, and if the quote trail is long, prefer
top posting. I don't know where the anti-toppers always seem to feel that
they can speak for everyone else.

I have never seen anybody plead for top posting, I have however very
often seen people asking kindly or humorously to bottom post.
If you prefer top posts that seems to be unlucky for you especially as
you did not ask either kindly nor humorously.
I however do not take any offense and I was not speaking for others
but transmitting information gathered over the years.
Please go through the trouble of looking at the common posting scheme
and what happens when somebody is top posting.

Please note also that nobody ever has been agressed when kindly asking
not to top post, as it just happened to me I am afraid that maybe I
was not kind enough, if this is the case all my apologies.

It however remains my intimate conviction that bottom posting is the
accepted standard on this list, but if all of those who prefer top
posting speak up, things might change.

Cheers
Robert

--
http://jeremymcanally.com/
http://entp.com

Read my books:
Ruby in Practice (http://manning.com/mcanally/)
My free Ruby e-book (http://humblelittlerubybook.com/)

Or, my blogs:
http://mrneighborly.com
http://rubyinpractice.com

 

[Bill Kelly]

I've been doing this stuff since 1984. It's only been relatively
recently that I've seen the insistence that bottoming is the "one true
way" and the attempted intimidation of anyone who doesn't agree.

Odd... I've been on Usenet since 1986, but my recollection is
somewhat the opposite.

Seems to me bottom-posted inter-quoting was a well-established
standard on the groups I read back then (comp.sys.amiga, other
programming groups).

If memory serves, the occasional newbie top-post would be met
with references to "netiquette", and requests to not only bottom-
post instead, but also trim for context.

My recollection is top-posting was actively discouraged, but
overall relatively rare until the advent of AOL, Netscape, and
SLIP/PPP connections which opened the floodgates, allowing
residential users onto the Internet by the millions. . . .

Unleashing an army of newbies armed with news and email software,
which, as has already been mentioned elsewhere on this thread,
encouraged top-posting by default. . .

Quotes should be trimmed.

Agreed 100%


Regards,

Bill