Why was the title of my original post changed?
Are the Julia devs so sensitive to the identification of problematic language features, evident by the number of contributors to this thread? Censorship is not the way forward for open source projects with great ambitions. The same applies to the modification of posts, including their titles, without asking for permission from the person who wrote it.
Very disappointing.
I do not think I saw the original title. But what are you calling censorship? Have any posts been blocked? Have any of your posts other than the title been edited or suppressed?
If the answer to the last two questions are ânoâ, then please refrain from using the word âcensorshipâ, so that we may reserve that particular word for how it was actually intended, suppressing ideas, not making minor language changes.
Edit: Calling upon censorship also completely derails what is an otherwise reasonble exchange of ideas.
In my opinion this is not a minor change. When someone changes the words of someone to something else then it is censorship to the original words and their intention and meaning. It is inappropriate but perhaps indicative of a culture that I prefer not to further associate with.
From what I gathered from a few comments, the issue was with the word âproperâ. Clearly, as we have seen, there are many people with many different view points on how code loading should work. Therefore the idea of a âproperâ module system doesnât really make sense. There will always be people who think the current system is not a proper one. This point, I think, was also made in earlier posts.
So, given that no single âproperâ module can exist for all users, it would seem better to clarify that point. But your main posts still stand, there are people who agree and have expounded on the idea. That hardly seems worthy of the word âcensorshipâ, which gets thrown around a lot in our current culture (at least in the US).
The mods regularly change the titles of discussions to better reflect the contents. This discussion was not about proper modules but about implicitly loaded modules. This way itâs easier to tell before you click what youâre about to read.
The original post was meant to express my personal opinion and not the opinion of others or an opinion formed after a discussion. If the title was not satisfactory to some a new thread could have been started with a title acceptable to the devs.
I suggest they put a warning in this forum saying that âyour post may be modified if the devs are not happy with your criticismâ.
The only thing that was changed was the title of the topic. One of the goals of the moderation here is precisely that: moderation. Weâll freely split and reorganize threads to better serve that purpose, but we wonât change your text inside a thread.
Julia does have first class modules; itâs simply not clear what âproper modulesâ are. Perhaps âimplicitly loadedâ isnât quite right, but itâs an attempt at getting to the root of what youâre asking for and (hopefully) steering the discussion away from a flame war about whatâs âproperâ and not. If this rename doesnât quite capture your intent, please feel free to suggest and/or make improvements yourself. Itâs also worth noting that the edit history is fully visible.
On that note, Iâve split this meta discussion out into #meta.
[This thread was split while I wrote this in the other thread]
Again, I would point out that no posts have been modified, your expressed opinion has not been changed, and the full meaning of your post is very clear from the start of the thread. I can read the original post and see that you donât think Julia has a âproper module systemâ. Literally no information has been lost in the change, so I donât understand the use of the word censorship.
But rather than continue this debate, you can put a complaint directly to the Julia Community stewards to resolve the issue.
Edit: Just linking to the original thread
The title of your post and overall tone, including in this new post, is very antagonistic. I personally have no opinion on the issue you raised about modules (which I basically do not understand), but I found the title of your post unnecessarily aggressive and suggested somewhere in the thread that a change of title would be the polite thing to do (admittedly I expected you, the OP, would be the one to make the change). You are calling this censorship, which is misleading: the person who edited the title intended to make the discussion more civil and more productive, which you were kindly asked to consider. IMHO.
It is often annoying when my post title gets changed, since it undermines my intent in communicating.
But there are some situations where the benefits of moderator intervention outweigh the problems. I donât know what âimplicitly loaded modulesâ or âproper modulesâ means, but a lot of that thread is about figuring out what the current issues with code-loading and namespacing actually are. I think that sticking to substantive unemotional descriptions is helpful, since otherwise people get mad about âattacksâ on âtheir languageâ (this happens in every ecosystem Iâm familiar with). And that even a nonsense thread title is better than one that makes people defensive, because defensiveness impairs productive discussion.
I changed the title to more accurately reflect the content of the discussion. Everyone sees titles and people regularly create threads with unhelpful, inaccurate or provocative titles. In this case, the implication of the original title was that Julia does not have âproper modulesâ, which is certainly a valid opinion which someone can express, but not an objective fact. What is an objective fact is that Julia does not have implicitly loaded modules and this is a discussion about adding that feature to the language. The title now reflects that, which makes it easier for someone perusing the forum to know what this thread is about. This is not censorship, it is moderation for the sake of making the forum easier for everyone to consume. Unlike posts, which clearly belong to the person who wrote them, titles âbelongâ to everyone on the forum.
Itâs quite normal that long-running threads become bifurcated as people throw in new ideas and suggest different solutions. Splitting the original thread makes it much easier to follow the different themes. 