Lambda the Ultimate

The real purpose of my remark was to bring up what I considered to be an important point, and get it into the discussion. The very good answer made it all worthwhile. The fact that I didn't read the paper and still haven't was my idea of humor about the subject. It is morally compromising and hard to take seriously except perhaps as a desparate and temporary solution.

The general idea and technique would seem to have merit. Exceptions are a type, and an appropriate built in response (other than oblivious-ness) makes sense. Programs break on errors and often open a debugger. The Intel floating point system somehow stuffs an "E" into the data stream on divide by zero.

The real purpose of my remark was to bring up what I considered to be an important point, and get it into the discussion.

Hank, when I said I wasn't intending to single you out, I meant it. I really didn't assign any negative intent to your post. We all sometimes hit the post button a little too quickly in our enthusiasm to get into the conversation.

My intent was to remind all of us that if we slow down a bit and put some extra thought into it before we respond we can have at least two long-term benefits:

1- The quality of story thread will remain consistently high and focused.

2- Newcomers to our community will not get the wrong idea that this is "Slashdot for PLs" and that the normal practice on LtU is to free-associate on the topic without having done any work on it.

Exceptions are a type, and an appropriate built in response (other than oblivious-ness) makes sense.

I think I understand what you mean by this, but it is on the verge of being a little too metaphorical even for me. ;-)

I think I understand what you mean by this, but it is on the verge of being a little too metaphorical even for me. ;-)

An exception is a Type like Integer or a Real. In C++ it is an object of a certain class. Exceptions get handled. The title of the post is "Failure-Oblivious Computing" What's hard about that?

though I would not have posted it myself, and sort of feel that this community policing topic is slowly becoming a disease

My own hope is that it is more like a fever: a transient state of discomfort whose purpose is to fight off an unhealthy state, with the hope of coming out the other side with a stronger immune system.

If I may mix my medical metaphors, the faster we rip the bandage off, the sooner we can get over the pain, and on to good health.

I do think andrew owes Marc an apology.

Apology is optional, but I do hope he expresses his concerns more thoughtfully. The sooner we come to a consensus about what we want, the sooner we can move forward.

I think it's the fate of all community sites to reach a certain size and then collapse (aka "go meta"). I've learned from sites like C2 Wiki that this is not such a bad thing: you can appreciate the good times and then let go when things progress too far.

You make it sound like the only community worth belonging to is the one that is still small enough and unknown enough to not require any effort.

LtU is lucky that by the very nature of its focus it probably won't ever be big enough that we have to do a lot of work to keep it going with its core strengths intact, but it is pretty sure that we have to do a little bit more than we have at this point.

One of the main things we're trying to do is almost the opposite of what you suggest. Exploring the comparison to Usenet may be instructive: Usenet already enjoys a kind of community ownership, in that in unmoderated groups, no-one waits around for a maintainer to come along and object to bad behavior, offtopic material, etc. — if someone feels like it, they'll just post their objection. On LtU, however, there seems to have been an assumption that the maintainers will play that role, which leads to us receiving complaints about material on the site rather than people objecting directly to the material in question. We want to play that role less, not more.

It would be a lot easier to manage the site without community involvement. It would take much less discussion, too. We recognize that there are members of the community who aren't interested in such discussion, and that's fine. What I recommend they do is to subscribe to the RSS feeds for the home page and possibly the main discussion forum, and then they won't see any of the discussion in this forum, which is about site operation.

As always, constructive suggestions are welcome.

Excessive noise to signal is essentially the only threat to Internet communities. There are, as far as I can tell, two sources of noise in Internet forums: Content unrelated to the topic---spam, gibberish, and so forth---and in-band meta discussions. The latter is more difficult to deal with and the bigger problem.

All of the communities I'm aware of that rely on community policing, including unmoderated Usenet and various mailing lists, eventually succumb to noise, not by ceasing to exist but by becoming mostly irrelevant. Unfortunately, the third alternative to heavy moderation is voluntary restraint, and that doesn't seem to happen much.