Be careful about what you dislike
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Be careful about what you dislike
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Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#2I'm fascinated by the topic of English Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
It introduced me to the idea that 'is' should be treated very carefully. Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best. It also introduces heightens the emotional tone of a discussion. If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Foo-ness is a taint on his soul. Contrast that with reformulations that make it explicit that John's foo-ness is a fleeting association related to both his present situation, your current perception of it and the current socially accepted meaning of foo along with all it's implied baggage.
I realise I might be rather off-topic :-)
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#3I'm fascinated by the topic of English Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime It introduced me to the idea that 'is' should be treated very carefully. Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best. It also introduces heightens the emotional tone of a discussion. If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Foo-ne…
> If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo.
Interestingly in Spanish and Portuguese there are two verbs of "to be": "ser" and "estar". These have different meanings: ser ist mostly used for persistent states of being, while estar is mostly used for something that is only temporarily as it is, but could be different the next time.
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#4I'm fascinated by the topic of English Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime It introduced me to the idea that 'is' should be treated very carefully. Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best. It also introduces heightens the emotional tone of a discussion. If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Foo-ne…
I don't think you went off-topic at all. The article says "avoid judgement of a particular thing, since it will become outdated in future". E-prime says "now you can't make such judgements because I have taken away your tool of doing so". I think they have the same goal.
(I wrote this comment in E-prime :)
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#5For comparaison, Ruby 3 is gonna introduce a pretty big breaking change (frozen string literals) but they already shipped a way to optional enable it by-file (magic comment) and globally to the ruby interpreter (just a parameter) so that all the libraries and projects can slowly fix it in a compatible manner (often just calling .dup is enough).
So that's when it's time for Ruby 3 the transition will be pretty painless.
More info: https://wyeworks.com/blog/2015/12/1/immutable-strings-in-rub...
(Frozen string literals allows strings to be in memory only once and not having to reallocate each time, so a pretty big memory and cpu optimization)
(Also for instance rubocop already recommends adding the magic comment to all ruby files)
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#6I'm fascinated by the topic of English Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime It introduced me to the idea that 'is' should be treated very carefully. Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best. It also introduces heightens the emotional tone of a discussion. If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Foo-ne…
> If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Interestingly in Spanish and Portuguese there are two verbs of "to be": "ser" and "estar". These have different meanings: ser ist mostly used for persistent states of being, while estar is mostly used for something that is only temporarily as it is, but could be different the next time.
Isn't that a bit like "is" vs. "is being"?
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#7I'm fascinated by the topic of English Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime It introduced me to the idea that 'is' should be treated very carefully. Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best. It also introduces heightens the emotional tone of a discussion. If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Foo-ne…
Who would admit to lying sometimes? Almost everyone. Who would admit to being a liar? Fewer people. But what is a liar other than someone who tells lies sometimes?
I agree that the idea something "is" something else is a tricky one in language.
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Interestingly in Spanish and Portuguese there are two verbs of "to be": "ser" and "estar". These have different meanings: ser ist mostly used for persistent states of being, while estar is mostly used for something that is only temporarily as it is, but could be different the next time.
Isn't that a bit like "is" vs. "is being"?
The "is being" construct also exists by using the two verbs ("estar a ser") but it's not the same. Basically in order of permanence:
ser -> a mostly permanent characteristic
estar -> a current characteristic that could change in the future
estar a ser -> a characteristic of the specific interaction
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#9It's not the responsibility of the author to anticipate future changes that might weaken his current arguments. The reader is responsible for taking into account the time and context of the text they are reading.
It's why we like to have e.g. "(2013)" added to anchor texts on HN, for example.
Re: Be careful about what you dislike
#10I think a sideline point here is to not appropriate other people's opinions from a specific point in time just because they happen to align with yours (opinion/bias) at the current time.
And of course, try to have as wide and deep an understanding of the subject as possible before forming strong publicised opinion in the first place.