Then what about the author's other points where you can increase your productivity if you avoid all alcohol and get good rest. If productivity is what is most important, then maybe your employer should be allowed to limit your alcohol consumption during your off-hours.
If you're employing someone putting together sprockets on an assembly line, then yes, productivity may be the most important thing to you. If you are employing managers, designers, programmers, advertising folks... then maybe productivity is not your primary goal. Maybe getting the smartest work from them is more important than getting the greatest amount of output.
Personally, I'd rather have one brilliant, game-changing program/algorithm/policy/advertisement than one hundred mediocre pieces of output.
He decries the lack of respect given to developers of creative works, yet here he steals ideas from another creative group and uses it without any attribution whatsoever.
I'd say it detracts from the strength of his argument just a bit.
(Note: hopefully he fixes this in the future, but no attribution as of Oct 14, 2012 10:51am)
I'd give him the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes people quote things in that way because they're huge fans and the source is taken for granted in their world. They think everyone knows it and those who don't, should. (I've done this myself and realized later that it looked like plagiarism, which dismayed me because my intention was exactly the opposite, to honor the source by acting like it didn't need to be mentioned.)
Blog titles are also a common place for people to adopt cool quotes that are particularly meaningful to them - it has almost become a little genre - and it would spoil the fun to footnote them. This guy actually has quotation marks around his, so he's more punctilious than most.
Maybe because scary things crawl out of dark holes? Because you can drop things into holes & not get them out? Because you can hurt your little finger putting it into holes where it doesn't belong? How about Flash Gordon's Trial by Treebeast?
You certainly know your market better than I do, but it seems to me that you are taking advantage of a viral effect. As people use Jira (for instance) and they move around from one company to another, they're likely to recommend using Jira at their new places when they get sick of Rational, Remedy, Bugzilla, etc.
People using Jira and realizing that there is a bug tracker that doesn't stink are very likely to bring that message to their next company. The word about a great product spreads... like a virus, albeit a slower moving one than pet rocks.
Yup, I came here to note the "its" problem. I won't try the app or look any further, because anybody who can't be bothered to use proper grammar on a publicity stunt sure as hell isn't going to release a quality product.
That is not a just correlation. Someone who is creative enough to come up with something like this, probably has a creative app as well. It is nearly impossible to put out a product without any minor mistakes.
I don't consider this creative, personally. People have been littering my car with leaflets for many years. Every single time, I get annoyed and throw them away.
That's pretty harsh. I understand that it's silly to not proofread very carefully when doing a stunt like this, but language mistakes aren't a sign of incompetence.
Right, by incompetence I was referring to the parent's comment towards the guy not being able to build a quality product because he left an apostrophe out of a word.
Not really. Someone launches a hot-new-startup-you-just-have-to-see every 20 minutes. The time I have spare to devote to looking at new things is super limited, so, much like with that old adage that "first impressions count", I start to filter things based on what are, in many cases, trivialities.
In this case, though, I don't feel that it's entirely trivial. Quality is something that happens top to bottom, I believe. Think about Apple -- while I dislike a lot of things they do as far as the walled garden goes -- I feel that they have a quality experience through and through. Every step along the way -- visiting the store, buying a product, even the packaging is well done.
When you have 30 seconds to make an impression on the people that might make or break your future, "that startup that littered a bunch of cars with dead trees and didn't even get someone to proofread" is not the kind of impression I'd want to be making.
Because as humans we don't make mistakes, right? You probably mean well, but this is the kind of attitude that people are complaining about in the HN community right now. People being cynical and instead of giving positive criticism people (like yourself) are picking on a lot of peoples grammar. I understand grammar is important, but working in an industry that heavily relies on print I see far worse mistakes than this on a daily basis by big large corporate printing companies all of the time. It happens, relax man.
Edit and wow, down-voted for telling someone to ease up on the submitter because there is a grammar mistake in the fake ticket? What the heck is wrong with this place? The community appears to be in a lot worse shape than I thought.
While I can't speak for him, my take on the kind of lame grammar sniping that sw007 was referring to in the post that kicked off that shitstorm[0], is posters on HN using irrelevant, petty criticism to dismiss and shit on others' opinions and arguments, in informal discussions internal to the community.
The grammar mistakes that fabricode (the guy you're responding to) is criticizing are in user- and investor-facing advertising copy. If superficial presentation matters anywhere, it matters there. And I feel like since this was something so bold, and those flyers and this post are probably going to be the most attention this company is going to get unless it takes off, the stakes are even higher. While it was maybe (maybe) a little snarky, no other top-level comment has pointed these mistakes out, and I think such cosmetic topics are fair-game to discussing things like this. If it's not already there, that criticism is pretty close to constructive given the subject matter.
Fabricode doesn't seem very upset about it? He's just pointing out an error, which could show negatively on the company. I know I would take them less seriously if I saw the mistake. It's healthy advice, double check your grammar before printing flyers, writing a blog post, etc.
There doesn't seem to be anything specific to a "Perl Shop" on the list.
Perl specific maturity items would be:
1) Do all packages have documentation (pod) stored in the package file(s), and is it up to date?
2) Are there tests built using TAP (e.g. Test::More), and is this built into some kind of continuous build/test server?
3) Have a set of perlcritic rules been set up for the shop? Are these checked as part of code-review or scm check-in?
4) Is there a consistent set of rules for how external packages are brought into the current build? How are local changes to CPAN-originated packages handled?
These are the kinds of policies I'd expect to see implemented in a mature Perl Shop. The policies listed in the original post are those which I'd expect to see implemented in a mature software firm.
These ideas are named to honor the person who did much of the grunt work to get them proven/accepted, but we continue to use the name as a convenience.
If you're working with educated people, it's a lot easier to say, "apply DeMorgan," than to say, "why don't you negate the clause, remembering to negate each of the internal clauses, and switching the and's to or's and vice versa."
There exist people who use the names to sound intellectual, and these people are annoying, but just because some people enjoy spouting (in the general public) "obscure" rules and names, that doesn't mean that using such names is without value.
In this case you could come up with a short name for it that doesn't refer to a person -- you could call it "logical duality", since, after all, it is both logical and a duality. But people know it as "DeMorgan", and in this context I think the most important thing is being understood. Those who don't know the law probably wouldn't recognize it if you called it "logical duality" either.
In the design of programming languages one can let oneself be guided primarily by considering "what the machine can do". Considering, however, that the programming language is the bridge between the user and the machine --- that it can, in fact, be regarded as his tool --- it seems just as important to take into consideration "what Man can think". (Dijkstra [1])
And this is why mathematics is useful to software engineering.
You said: Actually it does [mean he's wrong] because it is upon that logical fallacy that the counter argument is entirely built upon
Wrong is the wrong word :)
What you're looking for is "invalid". An argument is valid if and only if the conclusion follows from the premises. In other words, if the premises are true then it cannot be the case that the conclusion is false. Since a logical fallacy adds nothing to an argument, the conclusion does not follow from the premise. Since the conclusion can therefore be false, even if the logical fallacy is true, the argument is labeled invalid.
Just for completeness... A more strict standard is soundness. An argument is sound if and only if the argument is valid and the premises are true. If an argument is sound, then the conclusion is necessarily true. Obviously, the argument invoking a logical fallacy as its premise is unsound because it is invalid.
It is also perfectly possible for the conclusion to be true even though the argument itself is invalid and unsound.
If you still would like to apply the label "wrong" to it, then I'd say, "The argument is wrong, even though your conclusion happens to be true."
(Note: I can't see the post that started all of this off as it has been deleted, so I'm not making any comment on the truthiness of his/her conclusion)
If you are able to make this happen, it would be very interesting if you could get the visitors to write a short note before entering about what they expect, how well they think they'll handle the disorientation, etc. After they're done have them write a similar note about their experience and how reality matched up with their expectations.
For all of us that don't have access to such facilities, this kind of before/after diary might be very interesting.
If you're employing someone putting together sprockets on an assembly line, then yes, productivity may be the most important thing to you. If you are employing managers, designers, programmers, advertising folks... then maybe productivity is not your primary goal. Maybe getting the smartest work from them is more important than getting the greatest amount of output.
Personally, I'd rather have one brilliant, game-changing program/algorithm/policy/advertisement than one hundred mediocre pieces of output.