Thanks for putting the time into this response, Hernán.

I appreciate the wideness of the field we're touching on with the word 
"normative" here.

Yes, forming norms is in a sense about power and about individuality (or 
the lack thereof).

The point I think Andreas and Bert was trying to make by pointing you to 
the essay is this: rather than being an appeal to authority for a bug 
reporter to conform to some standard of behaviour, it's about decreasing 
the amount of effort a package maintainer needs to expend to fix your 
problem.

ESR's document is all about distributing the workload: you do as much 
work as you can so that the package maintainer doesn't have to (and can 
thus devote her time to making new features), and in the process you 
learn more about the software, which can't hurt.

In this case, I am all for normative texts, for very practical reasons.

I'd love to see some of those references!

frank

On 2010/05/13 03:59, Hernán Morales Durand wrote:
> Andreas,
>
> You already know that I respect a lot your work in Squeak and your
> will to help the community with your high skills in Smalltalk, most
> people like me are very grateful for your support all these years.
> Said that, I want to add I'm not happy of having to read some
> sentences in this thread.
>
> This is not the first time I see people appealing to Wikipedia
> ("authority") to support their claims, once I suffered listening to a
> guy (a .NET developer) which have never read a single line of
> Aristotle's work, reading me a Wikipedia excerpt of Metaphysics, where
> any student of Philosophy knows it takes years to truly understand and
> explain the work. Please do not take as if I'm comparing you with the
> .NET developer, actually I think Smalltalk gurus are more receptive to
> humanities, and that's why I take the time here to clarify some
> things, like you take the time to answer technical questions about
> Smalltalk. I feel many of you may take another view of things related
> with humanities, not better but complementary. That's why you will see
> me from time to time criticizing some texts too.
>
> In a sense, most of our common words have their own worlds.
> Normativity in the philosophical sense (for wikipedia readers, there
> is another entry which you may read to understand my conception of
> Normativity, although is incomplete and lacks of good references, it
> is enough) is one of those specialities very hard to understand (I
> should clarify I'm not expert in Normativity, but have assisted to
> Conferences and read papers regularly). Now it would be really easy
> for me to cite any book describing the theoretical principles of
> critical analysis of discourse, where the concepts of discursive
> process, fields, social identities, conditions of production,
> circulation and reception of texts, etc. are all explained.
> Normativity has a lot to do with discourses of power, forms of
> individuation, disciplinary mechanisms, social structures and
> rethorics. All enormous subjects. But instead of boring all the
> comunity longer, I will offer to anyone that do not hesitate to ask me
> for references privately, I will be very glad to see someone
> interested in these topics, it would be nice to share a space for
> discussing essays too.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Hernán
>
> 2010/5/12 Andreas Raab<andreas.raab at gmx.de>:
>> On 5/12/2010 1:29 PM, Hernán Morales Durand wrote:
>>>
>>> 2010/5/12 Frank Shearar<frank.shearar at angband.za.org>:
>>>>
>>>> On 2010/05/11 19:30, Hernán Morales Durand wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> @Bert, normative texts are never excellent.
>>>>
>>>> Isn't this a normative text? :)
>>>>
>>>
>>> No. Why?
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative
>>
>>         "Normative has specialized meanings in several academic disciplines.
>> Generically, it means relating to an ideal standard or model. In practice,
>> it has strong connotations of relating to a typical  standard or model (see
>> also normality)."
>>
>> Your statement sounded pretty normative to me.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>   - Andreas
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>