Chris, yes "going meta" is useful when it brings a chance for making things
to be a little better. Regarding to "paying attention" to our words.. I
modestly suggest that we all can benefit of improving our comunication
skills. That will print more value in all what we do. Learning a little how
to write well, some argumentation theory, knowing all classes of fallacies,
I mean, choose what is a priority for your case in other areas of knowledge
than informatics. That is basic for preventing those avoidable costs in
dev-squeak (and in life by the way).
I'm saying this because sometimes could happen that we need more than
attention. In smalltalkish: often we'll need anAttention + aNewInformation
that we can adquire it from lectures (not just googling) by reading it on
books on those non informatics topics. Good readers could make good writers.

All the best,

Sebastian
PS: just in case... by good writers I didn't mean just writing software ;)

> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org 
> [mailto:squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org] En 
> nombre de Chris Muller
> Enviado el: Miércoles, 23 de Mayo de 2007 23:01
> Para: The general-purpose Squeak developers list
> Asunto: Re: Smoothing Squeak's usability barriers
> 
> Sebastian, excellent description of the costs of ambiguity in 
> our language, which can be even higher in a low-bandwidth 
> mailing list.
> 
> In working with people from around the globe it can happen a 
> lot, and I don't mind "going meta" on someone like you just 
> did and asking for clarification when it occurs on something 
> meaningful.  We should all pay attention to our words and 
> their possible alternate interpretations.
> 
> Cheers.
> 
> On 5/23/07, Sebastian Sastre <ssastre at seaswork.com> wrote:
> >
> > > >are all the gaps they haven't covered yet of useful things
> > > that can be
> > > >done with a Squeak system. So let's forget conformism.
> > >
> > > I think you misunderstand me (I'm not always clear).  I 
> meant that I 
> > > know of at least two people already doing it, so it seems 
> reasonable 
> > > that more people would want to as well.
> > >
> > JJ,
> >
> >         It's like:
> >
> > -I have friend with a pop eye named John -Really? And how 
> it's named 
> > he's other eye?
> >
> >         It's called 'syntactic ambiguity'. It's a problem that our 
> > natural
> > (informal) language has (in all languages), so it's constantly is 
> > giving us some workload in pre or post desambiguations of 
> things that we say/write.
> >
> > All te best,
> >
> > Sebastian
> >
> >
> >
> >
>