Dour Linkspam of the day

[firecat]

"Why you shouldn't say it's easy when teaching" by Karissa McKelvey

As people become more comfortable with coding, they start to take abstractions for granted — export DISTRIBUTE=True in your bash rc might start to seem like English. We speak to eachother literally, in code (the enigma kind, not the python kind), and there is an entire lexicon surrounding the practice, enough so that newcomers can become alienated pretty quickly.
...
This is probably one of the most alienating feelings I had to overcome as I started computer science. It was hard to ask questions after people said, “JUST…” They might as well said “put the manabee on the doohicky.” I had no idea what they just said. But I pretended like I did, and just spent a lot of time doing searches online… which is fine, but wastes a lot of time and removes the human element. And some people just quit. We can do better.

Many of the folks reading this will be familiar with reasons why the Tone Argument is an inappropriate response to people calling out injustice. Ta-Nehisi Coates comes at it from another direction in "This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist".

Conservatives and liberals frequently wonder how it could be that unequal outcomes endure for blacks and whites, even after controlling for income or "class." That is because conservatives and liberals underestimate the achievements of white supremacy and still believe that comparisons between a "black middle class" and a "white middle class" have actual meaning.

Comments

[libskrat]

Ugh, there was this tech book I served as reviewer on once that was full to the BRIM of "this is sooooooooo easy!" and I told them to cut it the fsck out because RUDE and WRONG but they didn't.

I still kind of hope that book sank without a trace.

[firecat]

Doesn't it suck when you review something and the authors ignore you? Why did they even bother hiring a reviewer, I say to myself?

[flarenut]

Sometimes (having written lots and lots of stuff that was subject to pre-publication review, and done some of it myself) the reviewer and author (and editor) simply have completely different ideas about what the work was supposed to be. Never known how to handle that.

[firecat]

Right...when I have been a tech reviewer, the way this sometimes plays out is:

Editor: Please review this book of nonfiction.
Tech reviewer: This was presented as a book of nonfiction, but the author has written a book of fiction (cf. examples).
Editor: Actually it's a book of making money, so imma ignore you.

[silveradept]

These are both great links.