4 ms·
What's your email address?
by dash2 3y ago
What's your email address?
- cxr 3y agolettersregardingdavidnotknowingwhatprecedemeans@cold.moon
- dash2 3y agoStop talking to your email server! More seriously, it's called an "address" because people can "address" you with it. There's a natural overlap between at-ing somebody, and putting your name up so that people can at you. The @ sign helps clarify that is what this is, and it also differentiates it from the text. Have you got a simpler and more intuitive alternative?
- cxr 3y agoIf someone writes "Is this clearer? @stephen" today, that looks like a person who is not Stephen trying to direct their question to Stephen. It's not the most conventional way to do it, because the most common practice would be to address Stephen at the beginning of the message, but it's still unambiguously a message for Stephen, not from Stephen. That's literally what it means: This is directed at Stephen. The linked proposal reverses this by turning "@foo" into a signoff/attribution instead of an address, increasing the amount of ambiguity in communication—"Wait, what conventions are we following? The natural way of reading things, or are we in the world of Suggestions files where up is down?" > Have you got a simpler and more intuitive alternative? Yeah, the way people have been doing it forever: --stephen You don't need to invent new syntax for it, let alone counterintuitive syntax.
- dash2 3y agoBut the -- clashes with the delete symbol…
- cxr 3y agoWhose fault is that?
- dash2 3y agoMy fault, sure, but you didn’t suggest a better delete symbol. One would be ~~[ ]~~ but I think it’s less intuitive for the average person. I see the strength of your argument, but I suspect it works better for the extremely online.
- cxr 3y ago> you didn’t suggest a better delete symbol Someone else already pointed out the existing "plain word diff" syntax[1] that (a) is actually more human-friendly and (b) neither you nor the other respondent actually addressed—you both just pirouetted around it while hoping that no one would notice, I guess (by changing the subject to how bad Git and GitHub are—true, but completely irrelevant to the merit of using --[foo]-- over [-foo-]). > One would be ~~[ ]~~ That would be genuinely terrible—for basically the same reasons that --[foo]-- is worse than [-foo-], but more extreme. > it works better for the extremely online I thought this was supposed to be designed for actual human beings? 1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38791539>