Re: Please stop writing specifications that cannot be parsed/processed by software

Brava!

At 2023-05-28 10:57 -0400, B Tommie Usdin wrote:

>Nobody is saying you have to maintain sites for 
>non-geeks. You can address and serve the population that interests you.
>
>The population you care about is not the same as 
>the population that interests me. You have 
>decided to exclude from your consideration 
>people you characterize as "wilfully-ignorant, 
>non-geeky, non-hackery". The population I 
>consider influential, attractive, and growing, 
>includes many people who have no knowledge of, 
>interest in, or patience for, many of things I 
>find interesting and important and who put their energies in other places.
>
>-- Tommie
>
>
> > On May 28, 2023, at 7:57 AM, Shlomi Fish <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > hi all,
> >
> > On Sun, 28 May 2023 07:31:31 +0100
> > Michael Kay <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >> Actors always have to be reminded when 
> playing Hamlet that there is at least
> >> one person in the audience who doesn't know the plot.
> >>
> >> I think you are far too complacent about what constitutes universal
> >> knowledge. It might be true that everyone in 
> the English-speaking world over
> >> a certain age knows who Marilyn Monroe was, 
> but how many teenagers in China
> >> know?
> >>
> >
> > this seems like 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman or its inverse.
> > as a 6-12 y.o. in telaviv, i had to learn 
> that 9+3 = 12, which Gauss knew when
> > he was 4. https://www.shlomifish.org/meta/FAQ/#website_in_english
> >
> > maintaining  drupal/wordprress/etc. sites for non-geeks will drain my time,
> > energy, passion, and money.
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis .
> >
> >> Contrariwise, I've come across Americans who assume that it is universal
> >> knowledge how many cents make a dime, or 
> what age a child is when they reach
> >> 5th grade, and such assumptions just show 
> how little they know of the world.
> >>
> >> Michael Kay
> >>
> >>
> >>> On 28 May 2023, at 03:38, Shlomi Fish <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi all,
> >>>
> >>> On Sat, 27 May 2023 08:34:38 -0400
> >>> B Tommie Usdin <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>> On May 27, 2023, at 12:26 AM, Shlomi Fish 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I have a hypothesis that such 
> wilfully-ignorant, non-geeky, non-hackery,
> >>>>> people are becoming less influential, 
> less attractive, and rarer ...
> >>>>
> >>>> I am of a different opinion.
> >>>>
> >>>> There are far too many knowable things for 
> anyone to have deep knowledge of
> >>>> all of them. Some people choose to know a little about many things
> >>>> (generalists), some people choose to know a lot about a few things
> >>>> (specialists). Generalists seem to have an easier time in life than
> >>>> specialists. Specialists seem to be the people who get important things
> >>>> done. Slighting specialists because they are not generalists (or
> >>>> specialists in some topic other than their specialty) is unhelpful;
> >>>> insisting that they make the time and devote the energy to learn skills
> >>>> outside their area of expertise is an effort to dilute their genius, and
> >>>> likely to fail.
> >>>
> >>> I discussed generalism vs. specialism in "sherlock holmes about Awk":
> >>> 
> https://shlomifish.livejournal.com/1991.html . noone can or should be a 100%
> >>> specialist unless you expect people to 
> forget that 1+1=2, or that there are
> >>> 12 months in a year. "One does not simply not Know who Marilyn
> >>> Monroe is" [
> >>> 
> https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/image-macros/indiv-nodes/not_know_marilyn_monroe.xhtml
> >>> ]:
> >>>
> >>> [[
> >>>
> >>> Some have not heard of Sarah Bernhardt, or Sarah Michelle Gellar, or Ava
> >>> Gardner, or whoever, but everyone has heard of Monroe.
> >>>
> >>> She is, in a sense, a litmus test.
> >>>
> >>> ]]
> >>>
> >>> I know vim/vi fairly well, but dont consider it essential knowledge given
> >>> text is text, and there are many other text editors.
> >>>
> >>> OTOH, I dont know how to cook because I earn much more than 100 USD/day.
> >>>
> >>>> To circle back to the discussion of why standards are written in XML:
> >>>> I want the geeky hackery people to make it so easy to do things we know
> >>>> will be long-term helpful (such as create standards in tractable,
> >>>> long-term stable formats) that the specialists can do it without knowing
> >>>> anything about it.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> >
> > Shlomi Fish       https://www.shlomifish.org/
> > Apple Inc. is Evil - https://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/anti/apple/
> >
> > I want to create a programming language called “Multiply” so people can say
> > “I program in Go, Forth, and Multiply”.
> >    — https://twitter.com/shlomif/status/880376410820542466
> >
> > Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - https://shlom.in/reply .
>
>=================================================================================== 
>
>B. Tommie Usdin                 mailto: [email protected]
>Mulberry Technologies, 
>Inc.     https://www.mulberrytech.com 
>
>Phone: 
>301/315-9631 
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Mulberry Technologies, Inc.: A Consultancy 
>Specializing in XML for Prose Documents
>===================================================================================
>
>
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