This is useless advocacy.

Worse than that, it is stupid useless advocacy.

People need to tackle things one at a time. Telling someone who is learning a language that they also need to use an operating system is counterproductive. Telling someone that they need to tackle an operating system without giving them any solid reasons is just silly. Claiming that learning something new will make their lives easier is iffy in the short term, and given the proliferation of APIs in open source projects, is pretty doubtful in the long term. Suggesting that they immediately ditch their existing systems, which have lots of data that they care about and all of the applications that they know how to use, is a recipe for utter disaster.

Now yes, if you need a certain level of control of your system, then open source is better. I am not adverse to the right people using it for the right reasons. At the moment, in fact, I am typing into Galeon running on a Debian system. If this system was directly facing the Internet, I would set up and run OpenBSD. In comparison to what I am happy with, Red Hat is an insecure piece of proprietary shite that hobbles its basic update and dependency system because they need something to charge businesses a premium for. Have I established that I am not a Windows weenie yet?

OK, then now you know where I am coming from. So listen up. Please don't throw around counter-productive, useless advocacy. People get burned by it and it makes it harder to apply useful, targeted advocacy when there is an opportunity to make a real difference. As the doctors like to say, "First, do no harm." Please.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: The Gates of Perl are not newbie friendly. by Anonymous Monk
in thread The Gates of Perl are not newbie friendly. by Hielo

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