Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In defence of Douglas Crockford

atom-morgan.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 450 posts

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#81

Post by inopinatus »

rand_r wrote: post #76
inopinatus wrote: post #59

"as long as he gives a good talk/presentation" Given the content of your first remark, I'm strongly inclined to suspect this use of the explicitly masculine pronoun is first-degree trolling. This serves as a counterexample to your point, because as statements go, it would be simply be factually (rather than politically) correct to have said "they" rather than "he", unless you really do hold an expectation that all co…

Using the male pronoun by default is simply common practice in English, dating back at least hundreds of years. I wouldn't read into it.

Maybe it depends on your origins or age, but I'm over forty and attended a conservative religious school, and it boggles even me that anyone considers "he" the current generic/default pronoun.

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#82

Post by lake99 »

Matachines wrote: post #25
friendlygrammar wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost entirely contained in the javascript community.

And Ruby, and Python. Don't forget the guy that got fired from his job for making a "forking" joke at PyCon.

Ruby? Not as far as I know. Matz rejected the Contributor Covenant, and instated the PostgreSQL CoC. Maybe you meant Ruby On Rails? They have adopted the Contributor Covenant.

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#83

Post by tamana »

unimpressive wrote: post #78
rand_r wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the male pronoun by default is simply common practice in English, dating back at least hundreds of years. I wouldn't read into it.

I notice a fairly common tactic for trying to change norms is to pretend that the norms aren't norms and then aggressively shame people for doing a normal thing. This leads to a toxic atmosphere where people can't be secure in their words, social reality keeps being pulled out from under their feet.

When the normal thing marginalizes people, marginalized people are hurt. In recent years, they have started to defend themsves in force, the ks to unifying power of the internet.

The insecurity you observe is feeling of the erosion of privilege.

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#84

Post by nkurz »

x0x0 wrote: post #72
aidenn0 wrote: post #40

My thoughts: Maybe someone can tell me what's offensive about the first comment. It seems to be poking fun at programmer machismo. The second quote is more problematic. I'm firmly of the opinion that it is not slut-shaming because it presented both promiscuity and commitment in a positive light. On the other hand, it is perfectly reasonable for a conference to not want sexual metaphors in presentations. The whole "he…

In their code of conduct, the conference states, in part: Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other attendees. Crockford appears not to be a good match, even on just abrasiveness grounds alone. Though it would have been better to determine that before inviting him.

Regardless of the whether Perch's accusations toward Crockford are well-founded it would seem undeniable that Perch is insulting and putting down Crockford: https://medium.com/@nodebotanist/why-i-won-t-be-speaking-at-...

At the time of the post, Crockford was slated to be an attendee. In fairness, this would imply that Perch be uninvited from the conference for violating the code of conduct. Or does the code of conduct have an escape cause in cases where everyone agrees that the victim has really "gone too far"?

  Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
  by Donald Barthelme (1973)
Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he'd gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn't pay much attention to this argument.

http://jessamyn.com/barth/colby.html

It's a fantastic story, and while I'll concede that it's only tangential to critiques of codes of conduct, reading the story would almost certainly be more enjoyable than spending time thinking about the inherent contradictions of tolerating intolerance. If you prefer video, I was amazed to find that a couple years ago someone (Chris Rubino) remade Barthelme's classic story as a short film: https://vimeo.com/149832821

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#85

Post by borplk »

I bet someone will also complain that he "mansplained" one of his talks. Give me a break. Go solve a real problem. First-world morons who are so fed up with the comfort of their lives they have to actively go chase drama.

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#86

Post by monkeywork »

eli wrote: post #79
Tehnix wrote: post #29

I generally feel like there's a kneejerk reaction from people (especially in the tech community) to be "PC compliant", at the level where you almost can't have any discourse because it's such a minefield (can't imagine a rational person whoms first intepretation of the tweets is "that's sexist" to be pleasant having a conversation with). I almost feel in the minority (or just a silent one?), but I honestly don't care…

I feel there's a knee jerk reaction from people in the tech community to minimize very legitimate concerns about bias and about making people feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. I think it's easy to look past someone's personal preferences and outrageous comments when you're already part of the club. But respect that that isn't everyone's experience.

Because many in tech approach things with a very logical almost cold manner... They brush off emotional responses like offense, because being offended isn't a logical or useful response... Its emotion, it's random, and for many it's too much chaos to deal with.

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#88

Post by abhianet »

DonHopkins wrote: post #68
vidarh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it even more confusing on the basis that regardless of gender , calling the second case slut-shaming is bizarre in a context where Crockford is painting the "old web promiscuity" in a positive light for the most part, but pointing out that it has one specific problem in the case where what you want is commitment. To me it reads as part nostalgia for the old "promiscuity" and lack of need for complex network se…

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to put a network interface controller into promiscuous mode [1], and it's nothing to be ashamed of, and perfectly acceptable to discuss at conferences. Back in the "bad old days" of the simplex NCP protocol [2], before the duplex TCP/IP protocol legalized same-sex network connections, connect and listen sockets had gender defined by their parity, and all connections were require…

Completely off the topic, but interesting to know nonetheless. It always makes it worth the time spent going through comments on HN to find such buried gems.

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#89

Post by monkeywork »

inopinatus wrote: post #81
rand_r wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the male pronoun by default is simply common practice in English, dating back at least hundreds of years. I wouldn't read into it.

Maybe it depends on your origins or age, but I'm over forty and attended a conservative religious school, and it boggles even me that anyone considers "he" the current generic/default pronoun.

Maybe focus on the actual meat of the argument rather than the plate it's served on and you'll enjoy your meal more.

Re: In defence of Douglas Crockford

#90

Post by danso »

nkurz wrote: post #45
danso wrote: post #13

I've only seen Crockford once in person, years ago [0], and though I never heard of him and his curmudgeonly-approach to JavaScript, I came away with a very favorable impression of him (and JS in general). So I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, out of sentimentality. At the same time, I know that one speech and/or book is not enough (if anything ever is) to judge whether someone has or hasn't been harm…

Saying, "Back in the day, you could browse the web like a whore, not caring what your computer connected to. But with the new web..." But that's not what he says at all. For sake of argument, let's assume that he had said exactly this. Even so, I still don't see the claims being met. First, even though the metaphor may be "sexual", I don't see anything that would make it "sexist". Promiscuity as a behavior is far fro…

I think the hypothetical argument would be that "whore", in our current time period, is not only primarily used as an insult, but it's one that seems to be disproportionately directed against women. Not just today, but in our very recent history (on a sidenote, I wonder how easy the gender association of "whore" could be quantified by looking at Google's n-gram dataset).

Sure, you could argue that "whore" is used against men, e.g. "He's such a manwhore". Just like someone could persuadively argue that their habit of wearing Confederate flag t-shirts has nothing to do with 19th-century American thinking about slavery. But we make judgments based on a spectrum of pragmatism and likelihoods, and we can make our own decisions to attend or avoid events that invite or disinvite such folks.

In the case of Crockford, I fully support the right for Nodevember to have its own threshold for what makes someone too much of a jerk to be a fit for their audience. And I personally wouldn't be inclined to go to such a conference, because I think that that threshold would likely exclude too many people besides Crockford, such that the event doesn't seem worth my time or travel expenses

Post reply on HN