Hi Chris, On Mon, Jul 06, 2020 at 12:45:34PM +0000, Chris Mason via Ksummit-discuss wrote: > On 5 Jul 2020, at 0:55, Willy Tarreau wrote: > > > On Sat, Jul 04, 2020 at 01:02:51PM -0700, Dan Williams wrote: > >> +Non-inclusive terminology has that same distracting effect which is > >> why > >> +it is a style issue for Linux, it injures developer efficiency. > > > > I'm personally thinking that for a non-native speaker it's already > > difficult to find the best term to describe something, but having to > > apply an extra level of filtering on the found words to figure whether > > they are allowed by the language police is even more difficult. > > Since our discussions are public, we’ve always had to deal with > comments from people outside the community on a range of topics. But > inside the kernel, it’s just a group of developers trying to help each > other produce the best quality of code. We’ve got a long history > together and in general I think we’re pretty good at assuming good > intent.
I don't think anybody doubts your intentions. But they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I had a "privilege" to live in the USSR and back there Newspeak was not a fiction but a reality. And despite the good intent, I have a really strong feeling that this could be a step in a wrong direction... > > *This* > > injures developers efficiency. What could improve developers > > efficiency > > is to take care of removing *all* idiomatic or cultural words then. > > For > > example I've been participating to projects using the term > > "blueprint", > > I didn't understand what that meant. It was once explained to me and > > given that it had no logical reason for being called this way, I now > > forgot. If we follow your reasoning, Such words should be banned for > > exactly the same reasons. Same for colors that probably don't mean > > anything to those born blind. > > > > For example if in my local culture we eat tomatoes at starters and > > apples for dessert, it could be convenient for me to use "tomato" and > > "apple" as list elements to name the pointers leading to the beginning > > and the end of the list, and it might sound obvious to many people, > > but > > not at all for many others. > > > > Maybe instead of providing an explicit list of a few words it should > > simply say that terms that take their roots in the non-technical world > > and whose meaning can only be understood based on history or local > > culture ought to be avoided, because *that* actually is the real > > root cause of the problem you're trying to address. > > I’d definitely agree that it’s a good goal to keep out non-technical > terms. Even though we already try, every subsystem has its own set of > patterns that reflect the most frequent contributors. > > -chris > _______________________________________________ > Ksummit-discuss mailing list > ksummit-disc...@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ksummit-discuss -- Sincerely yours, Mike.
