Not quite
You outlined the response that you think would work, but didn't write out the full post that you think I should have written.
The problem is that I look at that outline and strongly suspect that if I had taken that and filled in the explanation that I am supposed to insert, the result would have wound up offending. Or if I did not offend, it would have been by luck, not skill. In fact that outline looks a lot like one of the responses to Drew that I threw away because I thought it would be offensive!
Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic here, but I managed to offend when I was trying not to. And, even knowing that I offended, it was not immediately clear to me why it was offensive to someone else. Given the discussion so far, I think I could now write the response in a way that wouldn't offend. But it isn't easy and it isn't natural.
What you've done is like giving a non-programmer a brief description of how a program should go and telling them, "Hey, you just write it like this and you'll be fine!" Even though it is obvious to you how to finish, the odds that you're going to get a working program out of that person are somewhere between zero and zip.
OK, it isn't really that bad. I am hopefully more competent at social matters than most non-programmers are at programming. But I clearly remember when it would have been that bad...
Cheers,
Ben
I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
