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pete said:
> Philip Potter wrote:
>
>> I especially can't understand it when
>> the correction comes from someone as calm and civil as Keith.
>
> I can almost understand.
>
> One of the things that I admire about Richard Heathfield
> is his ability to make trolls come unglued.
> Troll that are not bothered by anyone else.
> Mostly I've seen this happen in comp.programming.
> He does it "calm and civil"
> with politeness and with with a finess
> that is very difficult to describe or duplicate.
I wish I could claim that it's deliberate (because then I could simply stop
doing it) - a sort of "meta-trolling", or trolling the trolls, pushing
their buttons to make them react in their oh-so-predictable way.
But it isn't deliberate. The trigger would appear to be some facet or other
of my writing style, which many non-trolls do seem to find helpful and
clear, but which appears to drive the trolls to distraction.
When the trolls start providing useful articles about C here (i.e. when
hell freezes over, or perhaps a few months afterwards), I'll give some
thought to discovering ways in which I might change my style to avoid
"ungluing" them, as you so aptly put it. In the meantime, I'll continue
providing such help as I can to those who seek it in the way that seems
best to me, and if that means that a few bozos continue to clog up the
newsgroup with puerile nonsense, well, that's what killfiles are for,
right?
Some people don't killfile the trolls, because they find them amusing.
Obviously that's up to them. Nevertheless, I would invite such people to
consider the (fairly simple) challenge of writing a C program to mimic an
article by any of the current collection of comp.lang.c trolls. A few
stock phrases will be sufficient, I think. Slightly more challenging (but
really not *very* much more): generate random but characteristic troll
*exchanges*. You know the sort of thing:
T1: Oh. The. Irony.
T2: Yes, you're right.
T1: Too true.
T3: You're both so right.
etc.
To implement such a program in ISO C should take - oh, ten minutes, tops.
Once you've written such a program and run it a few times, you'll soon have
the shape of the solution space mapped out, after which it really ceases
to be particularly funny - at which point you may well decide to use a
killfile after all.
--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: - www">http://www. +rjh@
Google users: < www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php">http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
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