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Well, not really. When you quote a username like this, it means you're talking about the name—the symbol—rather than about the user. So this makes sense: 'ri
by gruseom 14y ago
Well, not really. When you quote a username like this, it means you're talking about the name—the symbol—rather than about the user. So this makes sense:
'riffraff is eight letters long
But this does not make sense:
'riffraff mentioned the project
... since names don't talk.
- tptacek 14y agoYou're being more philosophical about it than I am. I just wanted to be able to refer to users with names like "the" without putting scare quotes around the names. What I wanted, in effect, was to prevent evaluation of the names in the sentence. Not somehow quoting HN names feels even weirder; writing sentences like "anonymous says we should use the smoked paprika" or "nooonespecial stole our bucket of mashed potatoes" just feels wrong. I'm happy for it to be an idiosyncrasy of mine, though.
- gruseom 14y agoBut why quote the name? "gruseom wrote a comment to which tptacek replied" is no different from "Daniel did this and Thomas did that". Is it? If you don't evaluate the names, you end up talking about the names themselves. (Not being pedantic, just curious.)
- tptacek 14y agoBecause some people on HN have names that are ambiguous in sentence context. "gruseom" and "tptacek" aren't ambiguous; "the" and "noonespecial" are.
- gruseom 14y agoAhhhhh, I get it now. Yes, ambiguity is an issue. My son used to play an FPS that used scrolling text to report on what actions were happening. If you shot a player named, say, "gruseom", the scrolling text would read: You killed gruseom. One day I noticed that some wag had picked the username "yourownmotherhowcouldyou". Edit: You're basically using ' the way that @ migrated into general usage from Twitter. But the Lisp ' is so burned into my memory that it was surprisingly hard to see that. I do prefer your ' to @; it's not as heavy.
- saraid216 14y agoGlancing at submissions on the front page at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Lightning https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Lightning https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=appscript https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=appscript It doesn't help that people sometimes capitalize usernames when they put them at the beginning of a sentence. /shrug
- mjn 14y agoYour explanation is the opposite of the classic Lisp usage of symbols. In Lisp, 'foo is not supposed to represent the 3-character string "foo". It can be coerced to that string, but that's not the default or expected representation. Instead, it's supposed to represent an opaque entity, referred to with the arbitrary symbol 'foo. Usernames are much like that.
- gruseom 14y agoLet's change the first example to: 'riffraff is a symbol. Does that remove the objection?