Wait whattt https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/3721 Anyone find this SJW crap utterly annoying? Everyone is trying so hard to be politically correct, it's killing me.

you can't even make fun of it, because it's already such a parody of itself that there's no hope of satiric plausibility.

Some companies do have certain words blacklisted from their codebase and documentation.

My code will not compile if I name a variable certain words.

I would have to quit any place that was this anal.

I think the opposite. 2 years at a small place will get you more responsibility and the opportunity to wear more hats than at a big company where you'll be very pidgeon-holed in your role. Then after you learn a bunch of stuff at a low wage, you switch into the big company getting paid the same as someone who's been there 10 years.

I have caught myself using violent terms to describe things clobber memory, blow up the stack, trash a buffer, crash the system , kill a thread, destroy a pointer, etc. It is always related to something I don't want to have happen. I agree that in the discussion they are getting a bit carried away with their concerns. However, I have thought about some of the terms I was using and basically decided that being more precise would make for better communication. For instance, instead of stating a function blew up the stack it would be better to indicate that I pushed too many items onto the stack. I mean I could have blown up the stack by exceeding an array boundary or something like that. I am not into politically correct programming at all either. I just think that communication is so vital in software development that being more precise is a positive.

your (valid) point about precise naming is different from the thrust of that thread, even though a few people claim that as their reason for agreeing. the thread, at least on the surface, is about catering to the feelings of people who may have a traumatic reaction to seeing the word "suicide," because they've lost someone to suicide or have attempted it themselves.

PC at this level feels almost 1984-ish to me in its repressiveness, and yet somehow even worse because it's all done in the name of "caring" and "sensitivity." to me it seems to be actually about power and control, and exercising that power takes the form of social pressure and villainizing the opposition. it's both amazingly hilarious and kind of scary.

Yeah, man, not wanting constant reminders at work about your husband who killed himself is really all about 1984-style thought crime power and control.

I was reading a parenting blog post recently about how innocent questions can actually be quite hurtful.

These days babies can be premature by 17 weeks or so and still have decent odds of surviving. But when talking about their age you have two different numbers: actual (from physical birth) and adjusted (from due date). Adjusted generally corresponds to the physical and mental development of the baby.

So asking the age of a baby can actually be kind of complicated. If a preemie parent answers with actual age - it can get awkward because all of a sudden the asker thinks the baby has serious developmental problems. If a preemie parent answers with adjusted - it can get weird because the asker than assumes that the actual delivery happened much later than it did.

Even asking something like "Is this your first child" can be very hard on parents that have lost a baby. Because they have to choose between denying the baby they lost or explaining why their baby doesn't actually have an older sibling around.

But of course its ridiculous to say that people shouldn't ask these types of questions. Having any non-trivial conversations/relationships requires asking questions that might bring up painful memories/emotions and awkward conversations.

So... what's my point? I don't think its wrong to call attention to common pitfalls and scenarios that might cause people pain. But its also wrong to say we should always sacrifice clarity/communication/relationships just because it might cause pain to someone. For example, 'suicide' is a pretty concise word for a specific concept.

That being said, I don't think I've ever heard someone I respect use the term "Social Justice Warrior". CS has significant problems when it comes to diversity and there are real problems that are causing that. The people I see use SJW are more often than not contributing to the minimization of those real problems.

I don't understand, but I'm guessing you misread what I wrote.

I understand the point that GM is making. I do agree that many folks in that thread got carried away. Regarding "suicide" in a program name, if a thread/process commits "suicide" that doesn't tell me a whole lot. Just that it did something to crash ... I mean exit with some undesired exception.

The important thing to remember is that we're all going to exit with some undesired exception some day. So make the most of every clock cycle.

People who use mongo - do you use aggregate much or do you just find a set of documents for whatever list you want to show?

How about sharding and replica sets? I just had a 2 day mongo glass that spent about 1/2 of one day on CRUD basics and the rest on aggregate, sharding, replica sets, role mgmt., etc. As I programmer I was tuning out all the mgmt stuff since we have DBAs for that.

We didn't use aggregate a lot for user facing features but I think we used it a lot for a lot of backend stuff. Things like our backend admin tool.

We used mongo labs, totally worth it, imo for handling a lot of the dba/admin crap. We used replica sets and its usually pretty useful. We never actually needed to shard stuff.

Well, you know, this **** is normal.

Questions I hate being asked are "Where did you go to college?" or "Where do your parents live?" or etc. These are both difficult questions for me to answer, but the world is already getting to quiet and edgy, and comfort in asking innocent questions is better for society as a whole than everyone walking on eggshells.

You can make an issue out of anything.

I didn't read through the linked thread - but to me saying something committed suicide tells me that it purposefully quit. That should be more specific than saying something died (or exited with an undesired exception).

I agree.

Also agreed. But, to be clear, some issues are worthwhile.

Standard classist microaggression

It's amazing how succinctly these two posts demonstrate the chasm in attitude between millennials and non-millennials.

I'm with gaming_mouse on this. If reading the word "suicide" in any context causes you so much pain that you can't bear to see it, then you get therapy until it stops doing that. You don't expect the rest of the world to coddle you. It's just a word. It doesn't need to have so much power. I have a similar view on other taboo words, including the infamous one from the US, but then again I'm a privileged middle-age cis white male so wtf do I know...

This is an example of the tactics I was referring to. Your post suggests I am an insensitive, perhaps even cruel, because I don't submit to the new decree to avoid the possibly traumatic word "suicide." It also suggests the reason for my insensitivity is my lack of empathy and failure to recognize experiences that would make the word "suicide" traumatic.

Yet in fact I've lost one friend to suicide, a number of acquaintances, and had a close friend attempt suicide. In addition, one of my two closest friends lost a brother to suicide, and the other lost a very close friend to suicide. Yet neither I nor anyone I know would ever dream of forcing other people to stop using the word "suicide."

So yes, when people do want to exert that force, I think it's much more about attention-seeking and power dynamics than anything else. Which isn't to say I don't believe it's a loaded word for some people -- but that word is privately loaded. Nobody uses it as a form of persecution against you.

If my mother were brutally killed by a man name "John," should I have the right to ask the John at work to start going by another name? It's not even a slippery slope argument, because that suicide thread shows that we're already at the bottom of the slope.


Both of these nail the crux of the issue for me. I think it's great that language intended to hurt or marginalize people, or language with a history of doing so, is policed these days and considered socially inappropriate. Some forms of PC are a good thing.

But you can't extend it to people's personal associations with words, if only because public discourse wouldn't be possible anymore.


I mostly agree. The problem is that, and this is a general principle, anytime legitimately disenfranchised people are given power, other people will co-opt that power for illegitimate purposes if they can. It's almost a sad game theoretic inevitability, and related to the tragedy of the commons, but the examples are endless: claiming discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or religion when performance or ability was the true reason, using a false accusation of sexual assault for leverage or revenge, and so on.

Some people try to use these false claims to discredit the legitimate claims of real victims, and others try to protect the real victims by pretending that no false claims exist. But both positions are wrong. I think we should have a strong bias in favor of victim's claims, but we can't pretend they are sacrosanct and incorruptible, because that only increases their power and hence the motivation to fabricate them.

I agree with all of this.

Edit: By quoting this section I don't mean to imply I don't agree with the rest. Just that this part is the part I think is most important.

Hate to break it to you boss, but you clearly do have a lack of empathy.

You seem to think everyone experiences grief from the suicide of a loved one exactly the way you do, and can't possibly imagine that someone somewhere might be different than you are. "I experienced it this way, ergo no one else can experience it any other way or there's something wrong with them."

That's like textbook lack of empathy.

LK, you should do a better job of trying to understand what people mean. Particularly when what they've written is pretty clear.

GM, isn't remotely showing a lack of empathy there.

the wording was ambiguous. Unless I'm misunderstanding you, this would also be a true statement:

even though it appears to be the opposite of what you wrote.