4 ms·

Honest question. Where does one stop clarifying things?

wk_end 6mo ago
One of the basic principles of communication is that you have a mental model of the person you're communicating with and are phrasing what you want them to understand in terms that you think they'll understand. So whenever you're writing something - anything - you should be writing with a target audience in mind, and stop explaining right around the point where you believe that your target audience doesn't need further explanation. Of course it's normal for there to be a disconnect between your assumptions about your target audience and reality. In a real conversation this happens all the time and it's no big deal. When something's written and especially when it's printed it can be a bit more of a problem, so maybe better to err on the side of over-explaining. Also a good reason to have editors and proofreaders. But I'm rambling a bit. In this case, the link was posted to HN by the author, so the author might have had "average HN reader" in mind. Oberon never really achieved success outside of a particular niche in academia, so unless they went to ETH Zurich I personally wouldn't expect someone - even someone in tech - to know about it.
- luismedel 6mo ago
  Exactly. I knew what the link was about and didn't study at ETH Zurich. I (mistakenly?) think Oberon is that kind of "roots knowledge" shared between all of us, like Lisp or Forth. That's why I asked when one should stop clarifying things. Maybe some people need to know what a compiler os, or a VM, or a windowing system, or ...whatever. What I mean is that having so much info at the toe of our tips, comments like "you should put a link about what this thing is" are needless.
  - swiftcoder 6mo ago
    The problem with this is that there are so many branches of tech from 40 years ago that any one person is unlikely to be familiar with all of them. I'm plenty familiar with the whole Modula 3 -> NextSTEP branch of this little tree, but the Oberon branch isn't something I've run into before.
  - wk_end 6mo ago
    > I (mistakenly?) think Oberon is that kind of "roots knowledge" shared between all of us, like Lisp or Forth. Yes, I think that's a mistake. Lisp and Forth saw widespread commercial use, were hugely influential, and directly begat many other languages. While I'd expect most folks on here to be familiar with Pascal - you could say those same things about it - and maybe even know who Wirth is, Oberon basically saw no commercial use whatsoever and even in academia was basically only used at the school it came from. There's no real comparison.
  - fhars 6mo ago
    Yes, you are likely confusing Oberon with Pascal. That is the Wirth language people usually have heard about. They may also have heard about Modula 2, but assuming that is stretching it. I was already interested in computers at the time, but I still only remember Oberon as that even bigger failure than Modula.
- nothinkjustai 6mo ago
  Sorry, can you explain what ETH Zurich is? I’m not familiar with that term.
  - homarp 6mo ago
    it is an Ethereum fork, named after Jan Zurich (a cousin of the famous Chief Niklaus Emil Wirth). Jan Zurich discovered a little moon on Uranus, and named it Blaise see timeline on https://ethereum.org/ethereum-forks/ https://ethereum.org/ethereum-forks/
    - Rochus 6mo ago
      It’s also worth noting that Jan (who strictly uses the pronouns var / val) belongs to one of the most historically marginalized groups in modern tech: One-Pass Compiler Enthusiasts. They were repeatedly ostracized by the bloated LLVM cabal for stating that any build process taking longer than 50 milliseconds is a toxic social construct. The ETH fork was actually meant to fund a decentralized safe space where nobody is ever forced to use a borrow checker.
  - wk_end 6mo ago
    I assume you're just trolling to make a rhetorical point (apologies if not!), but FWIW: ETH Zurich is one of the most well-regarded technical schools in the world, and arguably the most well-regarded technical school in Europe. It has many famous alumni, including Albert Einstein. I think it's fair to expect most people in tech to be familiar with the big schools in the field, even the ones in Europe, though maybe that's giving too much credit to Americans. But maybe it's also worth pointing out some other principles of communication: ETH Zurich wasn't really the main topic of my comment, and it's OK if readers don't catch every reference; communication is invariably lossy, and as long as general meaning is conveyed that's OK! Also, given the context (the sentence "Oberon never really achieved success outside of a particular niche in academia, so unless they went to ETH Zurich...") even if the reader hadn't heard of ETH Zurich it could be reasonably inferred that ETH Zurich is an academic institution, probably in Zurich, where Oberon was successful. Part of writing is trusting that the reader is a rational person who understands how (the) language and the world work, otherwise communication becomes impossible. Some associated ideas in the philosophy of language might be the "cooperative principle", the "principle of humanity", and the "principle of charity". I'll frankly make a muddle of trying to explain them in detail, and this reply is already too long and too snarky, so in this case I'd ask the interested reader to consult Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, etc.

One of the basic principles of communication is that you have a mental model of the person you're communicating with and are phrasing what you want them to understand in terms that you think they'll understand. So whenever you're writing something - anything - you should be writing with a target audience in mind, and stop explaining right around the point where you believe that your target audience doesn't need further explanation. Of course it's normal for there to be a disconnect between your assumptions about your target audience and reality. In a real conversation this happens all the time and it's no big deal. When something's written and especially when it's printed it can be a bit more of a problem, so maybe better to err on the side of over-explaining. Also a good reason to have editors and proofreaders. But I'm rambling a bit. In this case, the link was posted to HN by the author, so the author might have had "average HN reader" in mind. Oberon never really achieved success outside of a particular niche in academia, so unless they went to ETH Zurich I personally wouldn't expect someone - even someone in tech - to know about it.

luismedel 6mo ago
Exactly. I knew what the link was about and didn't study at ETH Zurich. I (mistakenly?) think Oberon is that kind of "roots knowledge" shared between all of us, like Lisp or Forth. That's why I asked when one should stop clarifying things. Maybe some people need to know what a compiler os, or a VM, or a windowing system, or ...whatever. What I mean is that having so much info at the toe of our tips, comments like "you should put a link about what this thing is" are needless.
- swiftcoder 6mo ago
  The problem with this is that there are so many branches of tech from 40 years ago that any one person is unlikely to be familiar with all of them. I'm plenty familiar with the whole Modula 3 -> NextSTEP branch of this little tree, but the Oberon branch isn't something I've run into before.
- wk_end 6mo ago
  > I (mistakenly?) think Oberon is that kind of "roots knowledge" shared between all of us, like Lisp or Forth. Yes, I think that's a mistake. Lisp and Forth saw widespread commercial use, were hugely influential, and directly begat many other languages. While I'd expect most folks on here to be familiar with Pascal - you could say those same things about it - and maybe even know who Wirth is, Oberon basically saw no commercial use whatsoever and even in academia was basically only used at the school it came from. There's no real comparison.
- fhars 6mo ago
  Yes, you are likely confusing Oberon with Pascal. That is the Wirth language people usually have heard about. They may also have heard about Modula 2, but assuming that is stretching it. I was already interested in computers at the time, but I still only remember Oberon as that even bigger failure than Modula.
nothinkjustai 6mo ago
Sorry, can you explain what ETH Zurich is? I’m not familiar with that term.
- homarp 6mo ago
  it is an Ethereum fork, named after Jan Zurich (a cousin of the famous Chief Niklaus Emil Wirth). Jan Zurich discovered a little moon on Uranus, and named it Blaise see timeline on https://ethereum.org/ethereum-forks/ https://ethereum.org/ethereum-forks/
  - Rochus 6mo ago
    It’s also worth noting that Jan (who strictly uses the pronouns var / val) belongs to one of the most historically marginalized groups in modern tech: One-Pass Compiler Enthusiasts. They were repeatedly ostracized by the bloated LLVM cabal for stating that any build process taking longer than 50 milliseconds is a toxic social construct. The ETH fork was actually meant to fund a decentralized safe space where nobody is ever forced to use a borrow checker.
- wk_end 6mo ago
  I assume you're just trolling to make a rhetorical point (apologies if not!), but FWIW: ETH Zurich is one of the most well-regarded technical schools in the world, and arguably the most well-regarded technical school in Europe. It has many famous alumni, including Albert Einstein. I think it's fair to expect most people in tech to be familiar with the big schools in the field, even the ones in Europe, though maybe that's giving too much credit to Americans. But maybe it's also worth pointing out some other principles of communication: ETH Zurich wasn't really the main topic of my comment, and it's OK if readers don't catch every reference; communication is invariably lossy, and as long as general meaning is conveyed that's OK! Also, given the context (the sentence "Oberon never really achieved success outside of a particular niche in academia, so unless they went to ETH Zurich...") even if the reader hadn't heard of ETH Zurich it could be reasonably inferred that ETH Zurich is an academic institution, probably in Zurich, where Oberon was successful. Part of writing is trusting that the reader is a rational person who understands how (the) language and the world work, otherwise communication becomes impossible. Some associated ideas in the philosophy of language might be the "cooperative principle", the "principle of humanity", and the "principle of charity". I'll frankly make a muddle of trying to explain them in detail, and this reply is already too long and too snarky, so in this case I'd ask the interested reader to consult Wikipedia, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, etc.