Forum for Perl
Fate of the programming language pages [#14965]
The articles for Perl, PostScript and Python have been blanked and tagged for removal. Does the community agree with this decision?
Yes, when it involves topics unrelated to go, it is better to link to e.g. Wikipedia than to create our own articles.
I have mixed feelings about this. The pages as they currently stand aren't super useful. But I've just made a small edit to Python. If people are writing software and using SL, then a set of links to relevant libraries and source code could actually be a valuable resource, and something you won't easily find on Wikipedia or other "mainstream" Python sites. (Now I've just made this edit, the next time I'm trying to remember "what was the name of that useful Python library", I can look it up here instead of relying on my personal bookmarks collection!)
Perl and PostScript are badly out of fashion nowadays, so it's much harder to imagine these pages being useful. But does keeping them cost anything or cause problems?
If a page has go related content, then it is fine by me. I think Albert Einstein is a good example of that. But if it's just "this is a programming language and here's some links to download it" then it is useless. Perhaps it is even worse than useless, because the fact that the word is linked would give a visitor the idea that they can find something relevant on SL, which they then can't. Redirecting a user to Wikipedia would give them more relevant information.
these pages are not needed and can never be useful. SL is a Go website. the things that are useful and needed already have pages and/or sections: ComputerGo#toc26 and Computer Go Language Question. having pages for programming languages is like having pages for cars just because we can play Go inside a car. do we need those? do we need a car page? do we need toyota and subaru pages? do we need a page for 18-wheelers? no, we do not.
(a) Right now, Python contains some go-related information that is not at ![[ext]](images/extlink.gif)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
(b) It has never been a requirement that pages on SL must be "needed" or "useful". The site contains a certain amount of humour and a lot of interesting digressions. For me, this is one of the attractions of the place. We already have enough trouble attracting and encouraging contributors. I think deletionism would be the wrong policy for this site.
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If I knew a bit more about cars, I would go ahead and make a Subaru? page right now! We already have a Toyota page :-) And I don't think bugcat/Latin For Go is either needed or useful, but I'm awfully pleased that it exists.
While "deletionism" is not our approach here, I would advocate keeping the content Go related. The home page says "Sensei's Library is a collaborative web site about and around the game of Go ...". But it also says "SL is whatever you make of it." I interpret this as "it's about Go but other than that, you're free".
A Subaru page would be perfectly fine if about the company sponsoring Go tournaments or holding internal employee tournaments or whatever. A page just about the car brand would be superfluous. As Herman says, we might give the impression SL tries to be about everything.
A "Perl" entry page to the few libraries that exist for Go is perfectly fine, even if those libraries are already featured elsewhere. We have similar cases of multi-indexing.
I don't think all pages should be useful. It's fine if they're useless but funny, or interesting, or delightfully weird. But I think disappointing your visitors is bad. If I click a link on SL, I expect something useful or interesting or funny. If I click and I read "Subaru is a brand of cars", and that's it, what's the point? That's like finding an old supermarket receipt on the shelves in your local library.
IMO, bugcat/Latin for Go is interesting. Having go related libraries and tools on the Python page is useful. And there's plenty of useless funny pages on SL that I love. I'm all for B2 Bomber or stuff like that. But "PostScript (PS) is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982." adds nothing. It detracts.
Thanks for the love for my subpage :)
Would it be appreciated to copy content from SGF Organising Utilities to Perl? A lot of Perl-related content is there. It would be easily possible to turn the article into a list of Perl Go software.
The PostScript page is, I think, much less interesting.
Perl: yes, it would be appreciated. PostScript: I have no problem with deleting that one.
humor is good. many times i thought about adding some humor in pages when i edit but i never did. time wasting is not good. there is content here that has been
out-of-date for over a decade now. we will not celebrate anything stupid or retartet. what you are proposing us to do will only increase our workload and that would be stupid. we don't do stupid. we must clean it up and throw out the trash. i want to clean SL up and you want to turn it into the discord mod mansion.
now about the rest. if the software does not make you say 'F'in awesome' and/or 'F yeah', you must not include it. you include things that anyone with basic programming knowledge could implement. who the hell wants that? and no, we do not need things to be in a million places, that's retartet.
you will not turn SL pages into a link collection pages. you could put those links in your homepage or in a subpage of your homepage, or simply use the features that web browsers have had for decades now, and for good F'in reasons.
in a few words, we want to clean up and organize. we do not want to increase our workload. who the F will maintain all this ish? NOT YOU. so do not do it.
Access Blocked? i was previewing what i typed. did you do something bugcat? if yes, you must understand that censorship helps no one.
Re: access blocked.
It is likely that you were automatically blocked by the server; see access blocked for more information. I don't think anybody tried to manually censor you.
in these cases, you never know. look at what xela wrote. i have seen this in many places with people who have been around for a long time or since the beginning. they do not want perfection. for example, when people tell them 'do a proper job', 'this is how you do it properly', 'in this case you do X', 'in that case you do Y and Z', and when you tell them to kick to death the bad habits that they have, it bothers them. they become upset and/or they treat you badly and/or as someone who is there only to annoy them. i can say a lot more about this.
No, I did not block you. But I want to let you know that your way of writing looks very rude to me. This site is a community. It's a group of people who came together because we have similar ideas on how to do things. We're happy to welcome new people, and happy to learn. But new people would usually start more gently, take a little bit of time to observe how we've been doing things, make friends, build up trust, not just barge in and shout "you're doing everything wrong and you're all idiots".
"They do not want perfection": true! Perfection in the sense of technical correctness or tidiness is not the only good or beautiful thing in life.
Some reading for you:
I do agree with you about the GoWiki software being out of date. Proper SGF integration and better navigation would be nice. But it's not as easy as just installing MediaWiki. I don't think MediaWiki has any support for go diagrams out of the box? It would probably be a lot of work for Arno and Morten to update the software.
you clicked the wrong reply link.
i am not rude. i am here to help, and i am considerate.
from the Combinatorial Game Theory page info:
Version Date Author View Diff Info Current February 22, 2024 - 23:45 [xela] View diff to version 115 Revert. "Idiosyncratic" and "plethora" are absolutely the right words for Conway! 115 February 21, 2024 - 05:47 2a01:cb0c:0e98:8e00 View diff to version 113 113 June 17, 2023 - 12:07 2.86.206.211 View diff to version 112 do not waste the reader's time 112 June 16, 2023 - 11:37 [PJTraill] View diff to version 111 Cleaner and clearer; previous edit helpful, but perhaps unnecessarily colourless? 111 June 14, 2023 - 18:07 2.86.206.211 View diff to version 109
i could have reverted your 'revert'. i did not do so. PJTraill has been here for a long time too. i am not here to annoy and/or to make people angry and/or sad. i did think about how he might have felt after reading that 'Edit summary', and that is one of the reasons the 'plethora' word can still be found in the SLSnapshot page.
from the WikiEtiquette page: "Write in a way that is easy to understand and avoid using local slang or phrases. Many of those who will read your text may not have English as their first language" and "A conscientious writer spends time to reduce the readers' efforts instead of avoiding writer's work".
whenever possible, i kill two birds with one stone.
i rarely add {{remove}} in a page, and, just because a page is gone, it does not mean that in all cases its content is gone too. if it belongs here, i put it where it belongs.
so you see, we are losing nothing of value. we can always create a deleted page again in the future if something changes and it makes sense to have a page for it. again, i want these to be removed because we never needed these pages.
good writing and editing makes it easy for SL visitors to find the information they want or need. all they have to do is to use their brain, Control+F, and SL's search.
they know what to do and it will take only some work. check Template:Goban and the Ear-reddening game article to see it in use.
you are telling me that these pages are 'desirable imperfections'?
Hi 2a0b:f4c2:0004:0000, I don't know who you are. The other people commenting on this thread have bothered to register accounts and create home pages so that you can see information about our identity and our history. We have a combined 90+ years of editing and maintaining this library. And you turn up out of nowhere, anonymously, demanding that we "throw out the trash" and asking who will maintain it.
I also don't like censorship. (That's why I'm arguing against "I don't like this page so let's delete it".) But in your case I am very tempted to make an exception.
i am a Greek man and i have been here since the summer of 2023.
the goal is not to identify ourselves everywhere online. the goal is perfection.
for history, check page histories, use 'Last modified by:' in the advanced find page, see the recent and full recent changes. SL does not have User contributions pages. maybe it is time to switch from GoWiki to MediaWiki. from the SLAsAnAgeingWiki page: "Dated technology. (Compare the easy .sgf integration nowadays in Lifein19x19.)".
removing these pages is the rational thing to do. you are the one adding that ish and the one who wants to keep and add that ish. did i not show you that we have pages and sections for these things already? these pages do not need to be kept. you have mixed feelings about it? as i was typing this reply, i was VERY tempted to tell you that facts don't care about your feelings. why the hell would anyone have mixed feelings about this? hoarding is bad. throw all the crap out. keep only the awesome, the good, the needed, the useful things. humor pages can be kept too. simply make sure that those will not get in the way of progress. do not do things that will waste the readers' and the editors' time.
this is not censorship. it has nothing to do with what we like and what we dislike.
"But I've just made a small edit to Python". yes, you did, and it is completely USELESS. we have the SoftwareTemplate and the AdvancedFindPage for a reason.
what you want to add can be added in the right pages and/or sections.
Hi!
Having an identity, even if ony a nickname, makes a discussion less awkward than responding to a IP or MAC address. I would appreciate if you go through the trouble but you're a free person.
On the topic itself, I'm intrinsically "on your side" i.e. more inclined to perfection and cleanliness. But as a longtime librarian I'm also protecting the spirit of those who started (and still physically host) SL. And they have always taken a very liberal approach to SL, rather opposite to perfectionism.
As such, Herman has summarized it best: if it's about Go, that's good enough to stay. We can improve on it then, it doesn't need to be perfect. If it's no about Go, we can probably remove it.
BTW, "hoarding is bad" is not a fact, it's an opinion. It's an opinion I share, but that doesn't make it a fact.
Cheers
an IP address is an identifier also.
did you read my reply to xela? i wrote about these things already.
it is a fact. hoarding is by definition bad.
bugcat, we will talk first.
explain how your edit and xela's edit can benefit the SL community and the rest of the world.
Mr Anonymous, please don't abuse "minor edit" to hide actual significant edits. Enforcing your opinion on the existence of pages while discussing them only aggravates the matter.
i do not abuse. are you trying to make enemies? you believe that more people will want to contribute here if you and the other ones continue to do this ish? you are the ones provoking people. i did not touch any of the pages that we are talking about here since i first posted in this topic. you and bugcat did (and i reverted bugcat's edit only). also PJTraill touched a page before coming here to talk about this.
I have no interest in a fight. Like you, I have an interest in the well being of this site. We agree the programming language pages are superfluous here. Others think they have value. When in doubt, we leave things about. That's how Morten and Arno have wanted it.
The "minor edit" is not there to perform a disputed action in disguise. It's there to perform a non-contentious action so that it doesn't mess up the list of meaningful changes.
That fooled me: I see Toyota? is a redirect to Toyota Gen! Not that that helps much with the question of what to keep. There I am for consideration, caution and consensus. I would say we should keep any (correct) information that a reasonable number of Go players would appreciate for its connection to Go, even if that is faint. So on programming languages, the test would be “What might a Go player as such want to know about PLs?” Not all that much, I suspect; their suitability for particular classes of problems is often exaggerated! But it is interesting to know how a language has played a role in programming Go.
Another minor point: an IP-address is an identifier, but not for a person, and may vary.
tomorrow they might tell us that we need a skyhauler page.
most SL visitors are not programmers. the ones who are programmers also, will go to the source code repository and/or they will download the latest release and/or they will talk with the people who wrote the code. these edits cannot be called contributions. what they are doing is called time wasting and annoying people for fun. they have no argument or their argument is invalid. so SL does have idiots also, like these people who are wearing the vests. i am doing the same thing that the man in the beginning of the video did. i tell it like it is. their edits are not good edits. only the stupid, the liars, and the mentally ill would call those edits good ones.
i am the only one using this IP address here.
I am not sure what your point is about skyhauler, but I doubt anyone will propose such a page. Toyota? as an alias made sense to me and was definitely go-related!
Probably most visitors are not programmers, but many are, and we can cater to both. I do not know which edits you are referring to, but I suggest you try to:
- state your criteria for desirable information worth keeping here
- enter into debate on the criteria
- do not go around unilaterally removing information until consensus is reached.
Your tone remains worryingly aggressive and offensive; suggesting I go and watch You Tube videos to understand your point is seems unreasonable to me.
You may be the only one using 2.87.81.117, but you appear to have used a good many others over time, and I still consider it very unhelpful to make all your contributions anonymously. If you do not want to register you could still make yourself a user page and sign your contributions with a link to it, as Bill Spight has often done.
I don't feel that such pages are useless. If you are developing in any language, I can imagine that you would search on the language name to understand if somebody has been developing software with that. It's of the same utility is a page like GitHub, Sourceforge, etc It could perhaps be displaced to become a subpage of programming, that might well be more librarian like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
It seems that almost everyone here wants to have an opinion and to talk about their feelings instead of doing the work that needs to be done. PJTraill continues to provoke instead of coming here to talk with us for a solution to be found. Young and old men, what is this immature and silly behavior?
I am sorry to hear that you feel provoked: by what? Did you forget to log in, or are you another anonymous contributor?
You searched for pages that were last edited by the same person and you edited those pages with the intention to provoke, to bother, and to annoy that person. You want that person to go away. You did not present evidence and you proved nothing. You have no arguments or counterarguments. Those edits were clearly made in haste and out of spite. We are not here to fight. We are not here to edit according to our beliefs and feelings. You are a man who has been working with computers for decades. All the software page edits should have been self-explanatory to you. It is a shame that so many here are dishonest, shameless, and spiteful.
PJTraill: What I did was to check all recent changes for removal of information without consensus, and to repair the damage. Oddly enough, all such changes came from the same IP range.
My intention was to preserve information that could be of value to some users. I understand that may have upset that editor, but they were the ones making unilateral judgements on what was worth keeping.
I do not want them to go away, as they have done useful work as well. I want them to be polite and cooperative, and preferably to use a registered user name.
As Dieter said, your tone is unjustified; you also misinterpret my actions, perhaps wilfully. High-handedly removing information is more like editing “according to ones beliefs and feelings” than is restoring information many have assembled.
My experience with software is on the record but seemed only marginally relevant to my judgements in this matter.
I should clarify that we are a group of librarians who keep an eye on this site. That includes xela, PJ and myself. One of the things we do is undo damage/vandalism, for which searching edits by IP is an obvious device.
It can be argued your actions were not vandalism, but they were part of a non-agreed removal of content. Like I said before, I actually agree with the reasons for removal of most. But that's just me and as a group we're divided on the subject. The original creators of this site have always held a liberal spirit towards content and format, so we honor that.
As you may have noticed, your contributions which were not part of the one sided removal, were not reverted. You are absolutely welcome on this site. It's a collaborative one, so nothing goes the way each of us want all the time.
So, if there is still a disagreement, what are you all doing? Why do you add fuel to the fire?
Everyone must read this https://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed/#the-bikshed-email.
Here are two excerpts from the e-mail:
Excerpt 1 It was a proposal to make sleep(1) DTRT if given a non-integer argument that set this particular grass-fire off. I'm not going to say anymore about it than that, because it is a much smaller item than one would expect from the length of the thread, and it has already received far more attention than some of the *problems* we have around here. The sleep(1) saga is the most blatant example of a bike shed discussion we have had ever in FreeBSD. The proposal was well thought out, we would gain compatibility with OpenBSD and NetBSD, and still be fully compatible with any code anyone ever wrote. Yet so many objections, proposals and changes were raised and launched that one would think the change would have plugged all the holes in swiss cheese or changed the taste of Coca Cola or something similar serious.
Excerpt 2 A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is *here*. In Denmark we call it "setting your fingerprint". It is about personal pride and prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and say "There! *I* did that." It is a strong trait in politicians, but present in most people given the chance. Just think about footsteps in wet cement.
If you continue like this, Arno Hollosi and Morten Pahle will have to intervene.
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