On Wednesday, August 8, 2001, at 06:22 PM, Phil Weichert wrote:

> I think Daniel Joyce submitted a sincere request for help and 
> suggestions on
> finding employment.  Ned Konz made a tactless, thoughtless, and 
> tasteless
> comment: "Step 1: Learn to spell Smalltalk correctly."   The "t's" have 
> been
> further amplified by the following discussion on the correct spelling of
> Smalltalk. This is a major waste of bandwidth and subscribers time. A 
> lot of
> people must really have a lot of time to waste.
>   How to spell sMALLtALK does not contribute anything to Daniel request 
> for
> suggestions on finding employment.

It may not mean Daniel isn't a competent designer and coder, but it may 
look bad when applying for jobs.  Spelling it wrong would give the 
recruiter or whoever else is doing the interviewing a bad impression, an 
impression that alludes to the fact that maybe you don't know much 
Smalltalk, if you can't even get the spelling correct.

Again, it says nothing definitive about a person's actual skill and 
expertise, but it shows the person has been around long enough for him 
to be corrected by the rest of the Smalltalk community, which spells it 
in the "correct" way.

Likewise, if I were interviewing someone who walked in and greeted me as 
Aaron Reichert, I would most likely think him somewhat of a dolt that he 
couldn't get the spelling of my name right.

At the same time, if we're not talking jobs, who cares? :)  The business 
world means business, even if it's trivial things.

Aaron