Re: RFC - One word alias for require_relative

On Monday, June 20, 2011 09:17:51 AM Adam Prescott wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 2:54 PM, Christopher Dicely <[e-mail]> 
wrote:
> > OTOH, require_relative is much more clear as to what it is doing than
> > require! would be, amd. anyway, require! is 8 characters, not 7.
> 
> require_relative is completely fine. There is almost no sensible
> discussion here, and certainly not one worth 100+ posts, complete with
> people letting Ilias rile them up so that he can truncate text in his
> reply, call it babbling and declare the thread closed and "dismiss"
> people, like he owns the place, which just further aggravates people.

This is true. The actual, interesting discussion has been:

 - Is require_relative a good name? Most people think yes, but there have been 
some good arguments to the contrary.
 - Is there some inherent security risk in any require? There used to be by 
having '.' in the load path, but not anymore.
 - Can we use require_relative with autoload? Not directly related, but I 
wonder if it would've come up without this thread first?
 - Just what _is_ the policy on bang methods?

That's just on this thread. His questions are profoundly stupid, but they can 
also be a catalyst for real discussion, partly because of how they often deal 
with such obscure and fundamental properties of the language.

I know I learn things just trying to wrap my head around (and explain) just 
how wrong Ilias is about, say, initialize and constructors. It's fair to say 
that I'd forgotten, or never learned, a really solid concept of what 
constructors actually are in Ruby, and why initialize isn't a constructor (but 
is, in fact, a good pattern to adopt in Java code) -- and I learned this by 
watching someone else explain to Ilias how wrong he is.

> (Hint: it's intentional. He's being a dick. On purpose.)

Don't get me wrong, I'd rather not have him here at all, but despite his best 
efforts to troll us, he does occasionally raise some good points. Probably the 
most productive use we could make of him is to read his initial post, respond 
to that, and then ignore him and only respond to sane people for the rest of 
the thread.

Of course, this is why he's so dangerous as a troll. He's not just some asshat 
posting Goatse or Lemonparty. He's dangerous because he can give an appearance 
of actually having interesting questions, opinions, or observations, and then 
being a dick at absolutely every opportunity after raising the initial 
concern.

> If anyone else had posted his original "scenario", I'd bet it would
> have been largely ignored.

Unlikely. If you look at the people responding to him, it doesn't seem like 
most of them are people who (like me) should know better by now. If it was 
anyone else posting that, I might've been kinder, and given them more of the 
benefit of the doubt, but the response would still be effectively the same: 
"Why would you ever want that? What are you actually trying to do?"

> Can we stop being trolled now?

I suppose.

I'll probably continue to respond when it seems like there's a genuine 
misunderstanding, mostly because if a newbie happens on one of his misguided 
posts ("require_relative" is more dangerous than "require"? Really?), I'd like 
an actual answer to be there.

Plus, every time he responds to an actual, legitimate, informative answer by 
"dismissing" me or "closing the thread," I win.

But I guess this makes me part of the problem. I'm not sure what a good 
solution is, though. I hate to leave his crap unchallenged. Either responding 
or not responding still gives the impression that he's running the list, and 
gives him some amount of perceived credibility.