Re: [xml-dev] Please stop writing specifications that cannot beparsed/pr

[B Tommie Usdin <btusdin@mulberrytech.com>]

Nobody is saying you have to maintain sites for non-geeks. You can address and serve the population that interests you. 

The population you care about is not the same as the population that interests me. You have decided to exclude from your consideration people you characterize as "wilfully-ignorant, non-geeky, non-hackery". The population I consider influential, attractive, and growing, includes many people who have no knowledge of, interest in, or patience for, many of things I find interesting and important and who put their energies in other places.

-- Tommie


> On May 28, 2023, at 7:57 AM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif@shlomifish.org> wrote:
> 
> hi all,
> 
> On Sun, 28 May 2023 07:31:31 +0100
> Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> wrote:
> 
>> Actors always have to be reminded when playing Hamlet that there is at least
>> one person in the audience who doesn't know the plot.
>> 
>> I think you are far too complacent about what constitutes universal
>> knowledge. It might be true that everyone in the English-speaking world over
>> a certain age knows who Marilyn Monroe was, but how many teenagers in China
>> know?
>> 
> 
> this seems like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman or its inverse.
> as a 6-12 y.o. in telaviv, i had to learn that 9+3 = 12, which Gauss knew when
> he was 4. https://www.shlomifish.org/meta/FAQ/#website_in_english
> 
> maintaining  drupal/wordprress/etc. sites for non-geeks will drain my time,
> energy, passion, and money.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis .
> 
>> Contrariwise, I've come across Americans who assume that it is universal
>> knowledge how many cents make a dime, or what age a child is when they reach
>> 5th grade, and such assumptions just show how little they know of the world.
>> 
>> Michael Kay
>> 
>> 
>>> On 28 May 2023, at 03:38, Shlomi Fish <shlomif@shlomifish.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi all,
>>> 
>>> On Sat, 27 May 2023 08:34:38 -0400
>>> B Tommie Usdin <btusdin@mulberrytech.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>>> On May 27, 2023, at 12:26 AM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif@shlomifish.org> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> I have a hypothesis that such wilfully-ignorant, non-geeky, non-hackery,
>>>>> people are becoming less influential, less attractive, and rarer ...    
>>>> 
>>>> I am of a different opinion. 
>>>> 
>>>> There are far too many knowable things for anyone to have deep knowledge of
>>>> all of them. Some people choose to know a little about many things
>>>> (generalists), some people choose to know a lot about a few things
>>>> (specialists). Generalists seem to have an easier time in life than
>>>> specialists. Specialists seem to be the people who get important things
>>>> done. Slighting specialists because they are not generalists (or
>>>> specialists in some topic other than their specialty) is unhelpful;
>>>> insisting that they make the time and devote the energy to learn skills
>>>> outside their area of expertise is an effort to dilute their genius, and
>>>> likely to fail. 
>>> 
>>> I discussed generalism vs. specialism in "sherlock holmes about Awk":
>>> https://shlomifish.livejournal.com/1991.html . noone can or should be a 100%
>>> specialist unless you expect people to forget that 1+1=2, or that there are
>>> 12 months in a year. "One does not simply not Know who Marilyn
>>> Monroe is" [
>>> https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/image-macros/indiv-nodes/not_know_marilyn_monroe.xhtml
>>> ]:
>>> 
>>> [[
>>> 
>>> Some have not heard of Sarah Bernhardt, or Sarah Michelle Gellar, or Ava
>>> Gardner, or whoever, but everyone has heard of Monroe.
>>> 
>>> She is, in a sense, a litmus test.
>>> 
>>> ]]
>>> 
>>> I know vim/vi fairly well, but dont consider it essential knowledge given
>>> text is text, and there are many other text editors.
>>> 
>>> OTOH, I dont know how to cook because I earn much more than 100 USD/day.
>>> 
>>>> To circle back to the discussion of why standards are written in XML: 
>>>> I want the geeky hackery people to make it so easy to do things we know
>>>> will be long-term helpful (such as create standards in tractable,
>>>> long-term stable formats) that the specialists can do it without knowing
>>>> anything about it. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Shlomi Fish       https://www.shlomifish.org/
> Apple Inc. is Evil - https://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/anti/apple/
> 
> I want to create a programming language called “Multiply” so people can say
> “I program in Go, Forth, and Multiply”.
>    — https://twitter.com/shlomif/status/880376410820542466
> 
> Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - https://shlom.in/reply .

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B. Tommie Usdin			mailto: btusdin@mulberrytech.com
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.	https://www.mulberrytech.com                                                                    
Phone: 301/315-9631                                                                                       
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