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== Archives ==
[[/Archive 1]]
== Page vandalized again ==
Well, it seems someone (apparently Mr. "Lulu" if I read the history right) went surreptitiously (no comment in the history) through the whole material and destroyed all the font conventions -- all of them, not only color. All this without any discussion (in fact the comments expressed on this topic were mostly for retaining all the conventions.) The resulting text does not look like Eiffel; it violates all the typesetting rules of the language.
This is sheer vandalism and this person should be barred from editing the article any further.
All this makes Wikipedia look terrible -- Usenet at its worst. I am powerless to try to instill some civilized behavior here, but perhaps someone else will have the courage take over. Too bad, it could have been fun. [[User:Bertrand Meyer|B-Meyer]] 18:38, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
:But there are colours in the "style" header. Isn't that sufficient to indicate the preferred presentation of standard Eiffel code? When re-reading the article, after your post, above, nothing about it struck me as "terrible" --note that I am not an Eiffel practitioner-- and the separate header for normal style was informative without breaking the encyclopaedic convention. Or am I missing something here? Because I hope there must have been some significantly nefarious editing going on for someone to cry "vandalism" and "ban the witch!". [[User:Mikademus|Mikademus]] 18:49, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
::I am an Eiffel practitioner. Nobody I've ever met cares about the official Eiffel Font Conventions™ except Meyer. He's being inexcusably stubborn and rude on this point. --[[User:Doradus|Doradus]] 16:47, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
::If or when consensus is reached to use a non-standard style convention for this article, despite the rather glaring contrast with other PL articles, I will happily defer to such consensus. That's why I created the above "Quick poll" to gauge sentiment" (given that the prior reams of discussion were inconclusive, and excessively rancorous). But unless such agreement is reached, using the "standard Wikipedia convention" is really the only reasonable action. As Mikademus indicates, I took the trouble of adding an example using the "Eiffel convention" so that readers could see it, and tried to integrate that well with the narrative text about style conventions. If you think some other code sample would illustrate more conventions, I'd be more than happy to use such an expanded example.
::Do we ''really need'' the ongoing almost hysterical accusations and insults from Bertrand Meyer? This seems awfully close to [[WP:NPA]] violation to accompany the [[WP:AUTO]] violations (especially following on all the "idiot mob rule" stuff from before).
::And what's the weird thing with the scare quotes around my username? Not that four ticks actually harms me, but it seems peculiar... is this some sort of "discovery" that my birth-certificate didn't actually read "Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters" (I've actually used that name for about 14 years now, in various fora, and it's pretty simple to figure out roughly what my birth certificate did say... and notably, if one were to stand on ceremony as "Dr. Meyer" insists on, my honorific is 'Dr.' not 'Mr.' [[User:Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters|<span style="color:darkgreen;">LotLE</span>]]×[[User talk:Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters|<span style="color:darkred;font-size:x-small;">talk</span>]] 19:08, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
:::I really think you should have waited the result of the poll you have created, before taking any action related to style conventions. The bitter reaction of B-Mayer is fully justified IMHO. --'''[[User:it.wiki:Twilight|<font color="red">Twi</font>]][[User_talk:It.wiki:Twilight|light]]''' 03:42, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
::::The sequence of edits has just about no resemblance to Meyer's description of it. I was restoring a large number of wording improvements that he had removed, and did so ''only after'' he said "go ahead and restore" on this talk page. His "vandalism" foolishness is just another example of his belief that he "owns" the WP article because he created the language that is its topic. [[User:Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters|<span style="color:darkgreen;">LotLE</span>]]×[[User talk:Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters|<span style="color:darkred;font-size:x-small;">talk</span>]] 04:26, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
::::Do you know what vandalism is? How about large-scale removal of previously contributed material? --[[User:Ideogram|Ideogram]] 04:18, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
:::::For anyone thinking that the accusation of vandalism is in any way founded in reality, please reread [[Wikipedia:Vandalism]]. Vandalism should only be claimed when you can no longer [[WP:AGF|assume good faith]]. Blanking is vandalism, bold edits are not. I find it hard to view changing the font to the common font style used on WP and otherwise leaving the samples intact as "large-scale removal". The poll is underway, but until it is completed where's the harm in having the article adhere as closely as possible to common WP style conventions? -- [[User:Isogolem|Isogolem]] 21:33, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
::::::Just to clarify, my comment was in response to Twilight, not Lulu. The "large-scale removal" I was referring to was Meyer's attempt to withdraw his contributions, not Lulu's edits. --[[User:Ideogram|Ideogram]] 03:54, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
I am Eiffel agnostic, and do not have specific POV on ths subject. Can someone explain what is the contention about the "font conventions"? Please provide Diffs for the different versions. Thanks. [[User:Jossi|≈ jossi ≈]] <small>[[User_talk:Jossi|t]] • [[Special:Emailuser/Jossi|@]]</small> 19:15, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
:I added samples of the three basic proposed style conventions at the above quick poll. [[User:Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters|<span style="color:darkgreen;">LotLE</span>]]×[[User talk:Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters|<span style="color:darkred;font-size:x-small;">talk</span>]] 19:29, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
=== Why [[WP:AUTO]] matters ===
This is all so silly that I probably should not respond, but in the interest of openness, and to close my part: (1) I don't know where you get the idea that I care about titles next to my name -- I don't give a hoot, call me whatever you like. I am not sure how ''you'' want to be called, so "Mr." seemed a generic form of respect. (2) I do care about substance, and don't understand why you find it so crucial to spend your time removing again and again the carefully prepared style conventions of Eiffel, apparently as a kind of preemptive more since it's so much more difficult to restore them later than it would have been to leave them as they are and then remove them if that's the consensus view. (3) All the accusations of autobiography etc. make no sense; this article existed for 5 years (five years!) before I came anywhere close to it, and I simply made it factual; describing how Eiffel handles inheritance or object creation has nothing to do with autobiography. (4) The allegations of personal involvement are just as groundless; I took it upon myself to add to this article what it should have had in the first place, a matter-of-fact description of the language; there has not been any biased of self-serving element, and anyone who thinks he has spotted one can just fix it, like anything else, by editing the page. (5) It's true that it takes some guts to post under one's own name, especially if that name is known in the corresponding community; but I decided that using a pseudonym, like most of the people who have hampered the development of this article, would just be devious. The result is that I have been hooted down not because of what I wrote (with which no one found any serious problem, other than typos or other minor points) but because of who I am. There's this prejudice that because I have been involved with the language I should not be permitted to contribute to the description. This is absurd and discriminatory. I wrote descriptions of language mechanisms because no one else had done it and as a result the article was deficient in its presentation of the language (it was mostly expressions of various POVs). (6) Obviously a few people determined to make a point, Usenet style, have more time than I do, and I am happy to leave them the last word. What no one can deny is that even though the article is far from perfect -- not just because the font conventions are wrong -- it is much better than when a couple of other people and I started working on it (just see the record of what it was [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eiffel_%28programming_language%29&oldid=65276297 only seven weeks ago]). That's what counts, and it means that I haven't completely wasted my time. I hope that others, perhaps with names less likely to attract the attention of the censors, will continue that work, and wish everyone good luck, with my thanks for what I have learned in the experience. [[User:Bertrand Meyer|B-Meyer]] 12:02, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
:With "I have been hooted down not because of what I wrote (with which no one found any serious problem, other than typos or other minor points) but because of who I am." you're twisting the sequence of events horribly as well as adding a substantial self-serving and self-aggandising bias to the debate. No-one opposed your edits, regardless of who you were, until you started ignoring the concerns of several editors, started acting autocratically, and finally claimed all wikipedians a "proudly ignorant mob". Then, and only then, did the debate turn to being about you and WP:AUTO ''et ál'' started being invoked by commentors. [[User:Mikademus|Mikademus]] 15:02, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
:Call me whatever you like. 'Dr. Lulu' has a nice sound to it, but lots of things are equally fine. Like you, my well-known "real name" is perfectly apparent too (it occurs within the first few words on my user page; and takes no particular bravery or chutzpah to reveal; FWIW, it seems I'm "half as famous as Meyer" :-): [http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=%22Bertrand+Meyer%22&word2=%22David+Mertz%22]). Meyer's above note tends to emphasize why [[WP:AUTO]] really is an important concern. This isn't about rules-lawyering (yes, "autobiography" on WP is clearly not limited to biography as such; no, Meyer didn't ''create'' the article). Let's get to the real problem, and why it relates to [[WP:AUTO]]...
:Like Jossi and some others, I am entirely agnostic about Eiffel; I have have no great knowledge or investment in the language, but I have known for a number of years its general structure and the ways it differs from other similar languages. I really only stumbled across the article because of a slightly-too-exuberant couple sentences about it someone inserted into [[Functional programming]], which is an article I ''had'' contributed to significantly (though again, a topic about which I am pretty agnostic). The first thing that struck me upon reading the article as it was then was, indeed, how ''very jarring'' the idiosyncratic font conventions were in a Wikipedia article; and I indeed politely asked about that on the talk page (having seen some prior comments to the same effect there). My perspective is one of a ''Wikipedia'' reader and editor, not one of a dedicated Eiffel proponent and enthusiast. The garish color certainly harms the article from that perspective
:Now that I've gotten around to really editing the article, I see quite a lot of problems that pretty closely tie in to Meyer's role in writing it. I don't want to do a forensic analysis of exactly which word was added by whom. But the overall tone is really quite a bit off for a Wikipedia article. There are three general categories of problems that most strike me, all closely connected to this:
# The article reads much too much like advocacy. Rather than say that Eiffel does things such-and-such way, it tended (before my cleanup, more still needed) to argue why such-and-such is the ''right'' way to do it, and why other PLs are wrong to do it otherwise. And even where it wasn't ''per se'' "Eiffel is better", there were altogether too many circumlocutions into the thinking of the designers (i.e. Meyer) in chosing such-and-such. A general section on "design goals/philosophy" is useful, but not a reiteration of that when discussing each dot and tittle, as it had.
# The article reads much too much like a tutorial. It's easy to write tutorials, and some other PL articles fall into this trap to varying extents. But that assumes the wrong perspective for readership. Meyer (and advocates generally) start with the assumption the reader comes in with: "I want to learn Eiffel, what do I need to know?" For the most part, that's the wrong readership of an encyclopedia. Instead, they come in with: "I want to understand (a) What Eiffel ''is'' (i.e. a PL, one which has certain principles and strengths, etc); (b) How Eiffel differs from other PLs; (c) The history, tools, community, etc. that surrounds the PL". Readers should most certainly be ''pointed'' to other resources, such as actual tutorials on a PL. But an encyclopedia article isn't the right place to learn a programming language... it's the place to learn ''about'' a PL.
# The article jumped much too quickly into the specific lingo of Eiffel without providing context and bearings for readers who are likely to be familiar with other PLs. For example, before I added it, there was not even a ''mention'' of the fact that what Eiffel calls a "feature" is often called a "method" in other PLs. Similarly for many other terms and phrases.
:::In the interest of accuracy: a "feature" in Eiffel does not correspond to what is called a "method" in Smalltalk and subsequent languages. Features cover both "routines" (the closer equivalent to "methods", or "functions" in C++) and "attributes" ("instance variables" in Smalltalk, sometimes called otherwise, e.g "field", in other languages). I guess that if you want a word in a more widely used language it's "member". The reason for the importance of the word "feature" in Eiffel is the "Uniform Access Principle" which implies that you cannot distinguish functions from attributes from the outside, i.e. in "a.a_feature", a_feature could be a function or an attribute and the other class can use it without knowing which. Perhaps you could correct this. [[User:Fuchsias|Fuchsias]] 03:32, 9 September 2006 (UTC)
:Or to put it all in a phrase: [[WP:AUTO]] matters. [[User:Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters|<span style="color:darkgreen;">LotLE</span>]]×[[User talk:Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters|<span style="color:darkred;font-size:x-small;">talk</span>]] 15:37, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
Meyer points to an old version at [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eiffel_%28programming_language%29&oldid=65276297] in the above thread. I'm not sure if that's the exact version before his contributions, or what. But looking at it, I'm quite struck by what a nice tidy article it was then. It's not really clear to me whether that 7-week ago version was better than the current one, but it certainly avoids a lot of the pitfalls of the current [[WP:AUTO]] version, and was a very clear and well-written overview of the language at a conceptual level. I do think it's better to move forward with trimming down the newer additions, and working for NPOV in them; but it's quite striking how wrong the claims of prior deficiency in the article are: I really encourage editors to glance at that pre-Meyer version. What the older one was not, of course, was an Eiffel tutorial; which is exactly what a WP article ''should not'' be. I don't think the article is big enough to spin off an "Eiffel syntax" child (we did that at Python), but I encourage editors to keep in mind letting readers get the conceptual parts as close to the top of the article as possible, while postpoining syntax details until later (I just moved "background" up to this purpose). [[User:Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters|<span style="color:darkgreen;">LotLE</span>]]×[[User talk:Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters|<span style="color:darkred;font-size:x-small;">talk</span>]] 16:37, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
I would argue that the article is way too long and reads more as an how-to than an encyclopedic article. See for examples [[C++]], a widely used language. I would suggest to trim the article to a compact size, explain the overall concepts of the language, and provide some references for any assertions that require it. All other text could be moved to Wikibooks. Tag added. [[User:Jossi|≈ jossi ≈]] <small>[[User_talk:Jossi|t]] • [[Special:Emailuser/Jossi|@]]</small> 19:51, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
==What's wrong with language font conventions?==
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