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Groups > comp.lang.java.programmer > #25876

Re: Why “new”?

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On Mon, 07 Feb 2011 16:38:01 +0800, Peter Duniho wrote:

> On 2/7/11 4:18 PM, Ken Wesson wrote:
>> See my response to Patricia. You added "programming language" to the
>> query but the first post mentioning J did not make it clear that it was
>> a programming language  [...]
> 
> Oh, give me a break.  We are talking about programming here.  The word
> is even in the name of the newsgroup.  If you simply search for "j
> programming", you get just as useful a result

I would have expected "j programming" to turn up a lot of hits -- 
anything with "j" and "programming" in it. Any page on Java programming 
is likely to have both, and is likely to have much higher page rank than 
any obscure language or tool.

That's if google didn't turn out to just ignore one-letter query terms.

> Quit making excuses.

I'm not -- I have nothing to make excuses for.

All I did was ask what J was. That's not morally wrong, and consequently 
it's not something one would make excuses for.

> If you can't admit that you should have been able to find the
> information you sought on your own, fine.

Sure I could have tried mucking about with assorted google queries. I 
just plain didn't feel like it. Satisfied?

> It's certainly not worth any of the rest of our time to keep hassling
> you about it.

Then why are you? Hassling me, that is. At least four people have flamed 
me here in the past 24 hours -- you, Arne, Lew, and Mike. And all because 
I did two apparently-especially-heinous things:

1. I asked what J was.
2. On encountering a term for which I foresaw more than one possible
   connotation, I made no assumption about which was intended, rather than
   guess right OR guess wrong.

Now, please tell me:

1. what is wrong with asking what J is (ignore that this is a Java
   newsgroup and J is apparently nothing to do with Java; that wasn't the
   focus of the flamage); and
2. what is wrong with taking a term at face value instead of assuming
   (with the risk of guessing wrong) that it was (or wasn't) intended in
   a sarcastic manner.

If you can come up with no plausible theory by which EITHER of those 
actions of mine is morally wrong, then I respectfully request that all 
four of you that I have just named post apologies.

Thank you.

> you're not making yourself look any more credible by trying to actually
> _justify_ it.

Justify asking what J is? The only justifications I need for that are a) 
I didn't know what J was, b) the person I was asking did know what it was 
and had in fact just mentioned it, c) this is an unmoderated newsgroup, 
and d) the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of 
America.

> As far as the rest of your post goes, point taken (if not read through
> thoroughly…sheesh, I thought _I_ could be verbose).  Yes, sometimes
> there are those of us who fail to work hard enough to view something
> from the other person's point of view.  I've made that mistake myself.
> 
> But I don't agree that point pertains here.

Oh, it does. Unless, again, you can come up with a theory whereby it is 
some great moral failing of mine to have had the sheer, unadulterated 
*nerve* to ask what J was, or to not assume sarcasm where I could not be 
sure of its presence.

> I don't think you had any good excuse for not figuring out what "J"
> means here.

1. I did have a good excuse: from the context it was ambiguous which of
   at least three different categories of thing it might have been.

2. Furthermore, I did not need any excuse. I was under no obligation to
   figure it out for myself rather than ask. Indeed, given the ambiguity,
   I had little choice in the matter; it was
   a) ask the guy who'd just mentioned it;
   b) try various ways of asking Google; and
   c) give up
   Obviously c) was right out and b) struck me as too much effort compared
   to a). On the other hand a) would likely be slower in terms of clock-
   time than b), but on the gripping hand I wasn't in any big hurry to
   get the answer.

> Pretty much any search text that is reasonably relevant/specific to the
> context here and which is more than just the letter "J" is likely to
> have given you the information you needed.

That depends on how Google behaves if a query word is only one letter 
long. If it ignores that term then Google would be useless in this case, 
and it wouldn't be much better if it matched any word containing that 
letter.

> It seems pretty clear that you didn't even bother to try.

True.

> And that's just lazy.

False.

Why are you making such a big deal about it anyway? So I asked Arved what 
J was. Big fricking deal! I simply can't fathom why that is being treated 
as a grade-A felony. Anyone who felt it was "lazy" for me to ask should 
have felt free to simply ignore my post and thereby refuse to answer the 
question. There was no call for flaming me for merely asking it.

> So complain about me being snarky all you want.  I firmly believe you
> deserved it.

And you're wrong.

Unless, once again, you can provide a compelling argument that asking 
what J is in this newsgroup is morally wrong *without* using J not being 
Java-related as a premise (since that wasn't apparently the reason for 
flaming me).

> And if you thought _my_ response was too harsh, I can't
> wait to see what you think of the rest of the Internet.

I have plenty of experience on the "rest of the Internet" and for the 
most part people are NOT prone to jump down your throat for innocently 
asking someone to define a term they just used.

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Thread

Re: Why “new”? Peter Duniho <NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com> - 2011-02-07 15:48 +0800
  Re: Why “new”? Ken Wesson <kwesson@gmail.com> - 2011-02-08 12:30 +0100
    Re: Why “new”? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-02-08 22:58 -0500
  Re: Why “new”? blmblm@myrealbox.com <blmblm@myrealbox.com> - 2011-02-09 15:31 +0000
  Re: Why “new”? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-02-07 19:10 -0500
  Re: Why “new”? Ken Wesson <kwesson@gmail.com> - 2011-02-08 12:17 +0100
    Re: Why “new”? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-02-08 23:05 -0500
    Re: Why “new”? Peter Duniho <NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com> - 2011-02-08 20:24 +0800
  Re: Why “new”? Ken Wesson <kwesson@gmail.com> - 2011-02-07 09:18 +0100
    Re: Why “new”? Peter Duniho <NpOeStPeAdM@NnOwSlPiAnMk.com> - 2011-02-07 16:38 +0800

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