Cult-like behaviour [was Re: Kindness]

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:54 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:
>
>> On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 4:44 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
>>> Having gone through a recent 2to3 effort that left my conscience
>>> stained, I can only lament for the lost paradise which was Python
>>> 2.7. There *was* one real gain: MemoryBIO, but that's not enough to
>>> bring a smile to my face.
>>
>> Spoken like a true eight-bit-stringer
>
> True enough. Modern-day protocols as well as Linux file formats and
> commands intentionally blur the line between strings and bytes. The
> software in question deals with all of the above. It is virtually
> impossible to keep track of what is "really" text and what is "really"
> binary. In the end, the Gordian Knot was sliced by using Python3's
> strings for everything and restricting oneself to Latin-1 codepoints
> (almost) everywhere.
>
>> (kinda like a flat-earther only a lot more wrong).
>
> Ah, that's called "shunning," isn't it?
>

No, it isn't. Shunning would be killfiling you, which is apparently
"more polite" than telling you how utterly and completely wrong you
are.

What I would like to do is ban you for endemic racism, honestly. By
recommending and preferring eight-bit text strings, you're saying
"Chinese text doesn't matter". And by stipulating Latin-1, you're also
saying "Russian text doesn't matter" and "Thai text doesn't matter"
and "Hebrew text doesn't matter" and more. You are declaring that YOUR
culture is the only one that matters. When I see behaviour like that
in a Twitch stream that I moderate, I smack it with a banhammer,
because that is utterly unacceptable. Why should we tolerate it in
programming?

ChrisA