If you enjoyed this site, please consider donating $3. Any amount is appreciated. Thanks!

Cross-posting & Language Factions

Xah Lee, 2007-03-29

(The following article is originally cross-posted on 2007-04-16 to the folowing newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.misc, comp.lang.python, comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.java.programmer, comp.lang.functional.)

Dear tech geekers,

In the past year i have crossed-posted (e.g. recently What are OOP's Jargons and Complexities, Is laziness a programer's virtue?, On Java's Interface (the meaning of interface in computer programing), there are some controversy, and lots of off-topic and careless following.

I think there are few things today's tech geekers should remind themselves:

• If you deem something off-topic to “your” newsgroup, and want to tech-geek by changing the “follow-up group”, start with yourself. Please do not cross-post yourself, and tweak the follow-up, and proudly proclaim that you changed the follow-up as a benign gesture.

• Please remind yourself what is on-topic and off-topic. Unless you are the authority of a online forum, otherwise, netiquette discussion, policing, are off-topic in general, and only tend to worsen the forum's quality. This issue is realized in newsgroup communities as early as early 1990s.

• The facility of cross-posting is a good thing as a progress of communication technology, and the action of cross-posting is a good thing with respect to communication. What the common tech-geekers's sensitivity to cross-posting are due to this collective's lack of understanding of social aspects of communication. Cross-posting isn't a problem. The problem is the power-struggling male nature and defensiveness in propagating the tongues of a tech geeker's own.

Tech-geeker's behavior towards cross-posting over the years did nothing to enhance the content quality of newsgroups, but engendered among computing language factions incommunicado, and aided in the proliferation of unnecessary re-invention (e.g. the likes of Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby that are essentially the same) and stagnation (e.g. the lisp camp with their above-it attitude).

If you are a programer of X and is learning Y or wondering about Y, please do cross-post it. If your article is relevant to X, Y, and Z, please cross post it. If you are really anti-cross-posting, please use a online forum that is more specialized with controlled communication, such as mailing lists, developer's blogs, and website-based forums.

I hope that the computing newsgroups will revive to its ancient nature of verdant cross communication of quality content, as opposed to today's rampant messages focused on political in-fighting, mutual sneering, closed-mindedness, and careless postings.

References:


Related essays:

2007-10
© 2007 by Xah Lee.