Subject: Re: Char ordering.
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Sat, 09 Mar 2002 17:17:32 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3224683061220348@naggum.net>

* Jacek Generowicz
| > | Having said that, the fact that the approach _is_ error-prone is
| > | demonstrated by the line of lowercase chars in your code.
| > 
| >   I have added you to my do-not-help list.
| 
| I am sorry to hear that.
| 
| I doubt that adding yet-another-wretched-smiley[1], as I had been
| tempted to do, would have avoided this.

  Probably not.  You came here to receive help, and respond by ridiculing
  those who help you.  This is _remarkably_ stupid of you.

| Your sensitivities, in particular, I find extremely difficult to gauge.

  How do you react when people sneer at you when you give them a gift you
  think would be valuable to them, but which might have a very minor flaw
  that you could easily fix yourself?

  I help people I think deserve it.  I give you freely of my extensive
  experience and skills -- I have probably worked longer with computers
  than you have lived, and offer you time-saving advice so you can be
  relieved of having to go through all the same problems to arrive at some
  good practice.   I consider it my prerogative to refuse to help people
  who are so dumb that they do not realize that they came to a public forum
  of people far better skilled than themselves and ask them to save you
  potentially a lot of time.  You do _not_ just ask other newbies who are
  are as clueless as yourself, as in the usual horizontal communication
  that young people tend to think is all there is to communication, but
  vertical communication to what you should treat as masters and teachers,
  at least as long as you ask them to help you.  If you keep treating those
  who help you as if they were at your own level, anybody who have a clue
  will simply ignore your pleas for help.  I am impolite enough to tell
  you, others just do what I have done and do not even tell you.  What you
  react to is probably that I care enough to tell you.  Think about this.

  You might take some note of the fact that several other people reacted
  pretty harshly to your snotty-young-punk remark about the "error-prone-
  ness" that you immediately spotted, anyway, so it could not have been
  _that_ hard to detect, now, could it?

  Another item you should realize causes friction is when you ignore the
  value of the "Mail-Copies-To: never" header.  I started to respond to
  your mailed copy, which I expressly do _not_ want, when I noticed the
  news article.  When you send someone mail, at least identify it as a
  mailed copy.  As you grow more experienced in using USENET, you also mark
  your personal communcation as such when you respond to someone's news
  article by mail.  This is actually necessary because private and public
  communication are very, very different.

///
-- 
  In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
  In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.