Re: [tlug] Better to have "bottom-posted"?

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2009-11-11 12:34 +0900 (Wed), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> You are assuming that threads are nanotubules, a single fiber....

It may look so from some angles, but actually, I'm not.

> In other cases, however, a thread may be a bundle of such fibers (eg,
> when discussing an RFC you might have comments on sections 1, 3, and
> 7, and you actually discuss 7 first because it's the most important).
> I suspect that's what Steve is thinking about; it certainly is my
> concern.  In these cases, a top-post is really impossible to use
> without reading the whole thing, and your scanning method doesn't work
> well.

I disagree. The needs to be written differently if it's not
done in "interspersed" mode, but in my opinion this often makes
for higher quality posts, rather than lower quality. The common
"quote-a-bit-write-a-bit" mode of arguing in posts I find often tends
to get bogged down in details while missing the larger point of the
discussion, and many posts I see in this form could benefit from being
rewritten as a small, wholistic essay rather than a list of independent
point-by-point refutations.

> The reason I object to top-posting in general is the same reason I
> object to giving anybody in school a wordprocessor: it encourages
> shoddy, thoughtless writing.

Do you think that's really the case? As you can probably tell, when
I sit down to it, I take what I call my "edited" writing (that being
something I've taken the time to rewrite at least once, as opposed to
e-mail messages that I dash off) fairly seriously. Looking at such work
I've produced over my lifetime, what I've written in longhand and on
a typewriter doesn't even begin to compare to the 50,000 words a year
or more I've been writing on computers in the last decade and a half,
but it's not an insignficant amount. I find I edit a lot more, and
produce better work, on a computer because the editing and, especially,
restructuring is so much easier. Things I would leave alone rather than
re-type yet another copy get fixed when I'm using a computer.

> Without exception the busiest, most productive people I know all trim
> carefully and insert responses inline, even bosses and BDFLs like Mark
> Shuttleworth, Tim O'Reilly, and Guido van Rossum.[1]

I suspect this might be confusing correlation with causation. Some of us
are the types that will fix capitalization and punctuation in our to-do
lists even just before we delete the item.

> [1]  That's in personal mail and in public discussion lists.  It's
> quite possible they top-post in contexts where the boss writes "Looks
> good to me, Steve.  Do it this way, and report back next Monday."

As I do from time to time. :-)

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
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