How Discourse trust level works?

[rsrock]

Scott, If I had to guess, the reason that your post was hidden is that you misread a portion of Stefan’s statement, and that set you off on a tangent. Here is what Stefan said, where I’ve added a couple of words to clarify how I interpret his statement.

@StefanKarpinski

Like I said, we tried it @ScottPJones’s [[preferred]] way for two years and it has truly awful ergonomics for real-world data processing – this is not hypothetical or just my opinion, the data ecosystem has been struggling with it badly. Fundamentally, you need a string type that lets you choose whether to throw an error or not. You can wrap that in a stricter string type that always validates, but you can’t implement the relaxed version in terms of the strict one. So Base Julia [[now]] gives you the more general, non-strict version and leaves strict Unicode enforcement to packages.

He’s not disparaging the code that you wrote, he’s pointing out real problems with the overall Strings architecture that were there even before you came on the scene.

Let’s go on to the end of his message:

@StefanKarpinski

On the contrary, while this premise and point of view makes lots of sense in @ScottPJones’s line of work – building textual databases, where data is loaded once and queried many times – this is actually quite atypical. Most of the time, a program scans through a text file, computes derived values and then throws the text away. In such use cases, being forced to do lots of work up front, only to never look at those strings again, is a total waste of time and effort.

As a general rule of thumb for high-performance computing, you don’t want to do work speculatively, you want to be as lazy as possible. @ScottPJones is trying to impose a very specific world view on the entire Julia language and ecosystem: he happens to work in an area where it does make sense to do more work pre-processing your text data so that accessing it later is faster. That’s fine and it can definitely be supported with packages, but it is not the norm. There is also an asymmetry here: if the default behavior is not to do unnecessary work, you can always opt into doing more work. But if you’ve already done the work because that’s the fundamental built-in behavior, you’re out of luck – you can’t undo work that’s already been done.

I see this as an entirely reasonable statement of the situation. I don’t see how Stefan’s message as a whole can be interpreted as a personal attack, when he also goes out of his way to validate your perspective. When he says that “it can definitely be supported with packages”, I take that to mean that the Julia community will work with you to address pain-points, to the best of its ability. Turn the conversation in that direction.

My advice to all-- read every message as if the author had good intent. Even if the comment is forceful (“That argument is ridiculous”), don’t take it as a personal attack (“You are ridiculous”-- quite different).

Best of luck in your encounters with surly Swedes . Today, I have to make the Janson’s Temptation, and keep my better half from tearing into all the Christmas gifts this afternoon instead of tomorrow morning, so I know what an uphill battle it can be.