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Don't knock snark. It's perfectly valid way to challenge and traces its history to early computer science. It's why you fear goto. It's why I exploit it.

by oso2k 9y ago

enugu 9y ago
Nowadays, it has become pervasive on social media, and lost value as everyone uses it. It acts as a rhetorical device which can disguise the poor quality of of the argument.
- andreasgonewild 9y ago
  The word to keep in mind here is 'can', or I would say 'may'. The increasing tendency of crying wolf at anything you don't like by squeezing it into a category where it can't rock the boat anymore is not really helping us move forward collectively.
- oso2k 9y ago
  I would say, if it's Millenial Style Snark (gawd I hate to brand all millennials that way but they do tend to sound like the younger halo/gta 5/etc playing crowd) where they say something stupid like "Tests or STFU" or "callbacks or GTFO", yeah, that's tiresome. It's the kind of tone I saw occasionally in early nodejs discussions. I wouldn't call that snark, however. So I agree with your last statement. Snark to me implies a wit or cleverness as well as defiance and challenge. This is why it worked for Dijkstra. The brevity of the messages above are just a show of a lack of ability or desire to communicate and clearly express an idea. The above are just unnecessarily verbally abusive. They incite a negative response before the person even has had a chance to process other meanings of the message.
  - andreasgonewild 9y ago
    I sure hope turning the whole thing into a personality-attack was worth it for you. Do you ever consider the harm you do as you desperately fight to prevent alternate views from affecting your reality? Not to mention that it's a loosing game in the long run. Brevity is a virtue; and Golang has very little of it.
andreasgonewild 9y ago
Thing is, I'm not afraid of goto. This is more like random keywords behaving like goto in certain contexts.

Don't knock snark. It's perfectly valid way to challenge and traces its history to early computer science. It's why you fear goto. It's why I exploit it.

by oso2k 9y ago

Don't knock snark. It's perfectly valid way to challenge and traces its history to early computer science. It's why you fear goto. It's why I exploit it.

enugu 9y ago

Nowadays, it has become pervasive on social media, and lost value as everyone uses it. It acts as a rhetorical device which can disguise the poor quality of of the argument.

andreasgonewild 9y ago
The word to keep in mind here is 'can', or I would say 'may'. The increasing tendency of crying wolf at anything you don't like by squeezing it into a category where it can't rock the boat anymore is not really helping us move forward collectively.
oso2k 9y ago
I would say, if it's Millenial Style Snark (gawd I hate to brand all millennials that way but they do tend to sound like the younger halo/gta 5/etc playing crowd) where they say something stupid like "Tests or STFU" or "callbacks or GTFO", yeah, that's tiresome. It's the kind of tone I saw occasionally in early nodejs discussions. I wouldn't call that snark, however. So I agree with your last statement. Snark to me implies a wit or cleverness as well as defiance and challenge. This is why it worked for Dijkstra. The brevity of the messages above are just a show of a lack of ability or desire to communicate and clearly express an idea. The above are just unnecessarily verbally abusive. They incite a negative response before the person even has had a chance to process other meanings of the message.
- andreasgonewild 9y ago
  I sure hope turning the whole thing into a personality-attack was worth it for you. Do you ever consider the harm you do as you desperately fight to prevent alternate views from affecting your reality? Not to mention that it's a loosing game in the long run. Brevity is a virtue; and Golang has very little of it.

andreasgonewild 9y ago

Thing is, I'm not afraid of goto. This is more like random keywords behaving like goto in certain contexts.