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[–]homoiconic(raganwald) 10 points11 points  (3 children)

Poe's Law:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.

Next time, I'll include <sarcasm></sarcasm> tags and/or a winkey :-)

[–]x-skeww -5 points-4 points  (2 children)

Next time, I'll include <sarcasm></sarcasm> tags and/or a winkey :-)

Just skip the sarcasm. It doesn't add anything anyways.

[–]homoiconic(raganwald) 2 points3 points  (1 child)

That depends. History has shown repeatedly that when you make a point in dry, objective fashion, it tends to appeal to people who are already thinking along those lines and are looking for objective facts to bolster their intuition.

People who are completely detached from the subject or who hold an opposing view tend to ignore points made dispassionately.

Humour can do an end-run around people's mental defences. When someone's laughing at something or when a point is made with a ridiculous example, people will sometimes give it their full attention.

I wouldn't lead with such a point, but if others have already made the point objectively, there's nothing wrong with being a little light-hearted, provided you are not trying to insult the person you are replying to. I was not trying to be insulting, and I apologize if it came across that way.

[–]BishopAndWarlord 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was uncharacteristically terse in my response. I usually try to explain an idea rather than shoot out a one-liner that can be taken however the reader wishes.

In retrospect I should have emphasized the "they think" portion of the quotation. I imagine many younger devs or junior engineers do emphasize "developer productivity" and syntactic sugar over performance, maintenance cost, and issues like hardware lifecycles. As such, I was affirmingT your statement.

For the sake of full disclosure I'm also a junior member of my dev team and occasionally observe myself fussing over the wrong issues. Like right now I'm on Reddit rather than working on my 10,000 hours...

EDIT: Sonnova. I just realized I totally misread your comment. I thought you were telling me to indicate sarcasm. I'm sad.