On 21/12/2010 21:24, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 12/21/10 2:38 PM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
On 13/12/2010 15:49, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 12/13/10 9:11 AM, Jeff Nowakowski wrote:
On 12/13/2010 09:08 AM, Ary Borenszweig wrote:
Yes I am :-)
Since you were the Descent author, I wonder how you feel about Ruby's
lack of static typing. In the video, the speaker bashes type safety as
"having your balls fondled at the airport", that is, security theater
that doesn't accomplish much.
By the way, I couldn't stop cringing at the distasteful, male-centric
sexual jokes that the talk is peppered with. Wonder if there was any
woman in the audience, and how she might have felt. And this is not a
ghetto rant - it's the keynote of a major Ruby conference! (And I'm
definitely not a prude.) Am I alone in thinking that this is not what
our metier should evolve into?
Besides, the argument in favor of dynamic typing is one of the most
disingenuous around. C is a language for consenting adults that gives
you that kind of freedom. If we took the speaker's arguments to their
logical conclusion, Ruby would be a language for people who don't care
about correctness, despise efficiency, and have contempt for modularity.
Ah, hold on a second. I agree the talk was rude and unprofessional (not
that it was meant to be either), but I disagree it was sexist or
offensive to women. Looking at the comment in question, "having your
balls fondled at the airport", it's simply something that you cannot
convey with anywhere the same meaning in a gender-neutral way ("having
your gonads fondled at the airports"?... "having your genitals fondled
at the airport"?... "having your crotch fondled at the airport"?...)
You presuppose there's a need to stick with the original metaphor. There
are many good metaphors to use, and there are a lot of good jokes around
the "porn scanners".
For better or worse, "balls" has become a metaphor for braveness,
boldness, power, recklessness, (or a combination therefore), and has
even been applied to women some times ("does she have the balls to do
that?").
There are a lot of actually good jokes around that topic. I think this
one, for example, is not gross at all: when describing the shortcomings
of iterators, I mentioned "you have to have a pair to do anything". I
delivered that with a straight face and it was really interesting to see
the audience slowly getting the doublespeak and starting to laugh with
various latencies. I am subjective but I think that one is firmly on the
opposite side of a thin line than the "fondled balls" joke.
Andrei
I forgot part of my argument actually: Just as the "balls" metaphor has
that meaning, conversely, "being grabbed by the balls" means kinda the
opposite: being subjugated, dominated, restrained, kept-under-control,
emasculated, etc.. So I think the "having your balls fondled at the
airport" is a direct allusion to that metaphor, which goes in line with
the talk's general theme of anti-authoritarianism.
So yes, I am presupposing there's a need to stick with the original
metaphor. (in order to convey the subjugation meaning/allusion.)
--
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
