> For a community of this scale to survive and prosper, it needs guidelines to encourage productive and positive experiences, and to effectively deal with negat

> For a community of this scale to survive and prosper, it needs guidelines to encourage productive and positive experiences, and to effectively deal with negative experiences. Nope - actually it doesn't need any guidelines for its experiences because it is software, not an ideology. You can block spam and moderate discussions in whatever forums and mailing lists you own, but to associate a programming language with your arbitrary set of social norms is absurd. If anything, it is exclusionary toward people who don't subscribe to the "your freedom of speech ends where my feelings begin" world-view. > While a major goal of this proposal is to make the community more inclusive, this does by definition exclude people that cannot abide by the goals and principles of the code. I see this as a regrettable but necessary and inescapable design tradeoff. The implementation of the code may cause us to lose a few people, but we stand to gain much more. You "stand to gain much more"? Who are you to decide that creating rules to exclude one group of people in order to comfort another group is a good decision? And it's not an "inescapable design tradeoff" - you can escape the design tradeoff by simply not adding your rules to the project. > Examples of "microaggressions": > - J is a regular poster to the golang-nuts mailing list. On one thread, they make the comment "Go's type system is so simple even my grandma could understand it." > - Another poster points out that the comment goes against the code of conduct, since it marginalises women and the elderly by implying that something need be simple for an old woman to understand it. The phrase "even my grandma could..." is a fairly common idiom and is not meant to be taken literally. If anything, J's comment should be ignored because J is just stating a random opinion. However, playing the devil's advocate, I could say that the 2nd poster is actually committing a cultural "microaggression" against J, and is marginalizing J for J's distinctive dialect.