So you are implying that the person who wrote this article is suffering from some "mental health issue". I never implied that anywhere in my comment. I called people who require you to adjust to their expectations of what normalcy is, to be snowflake behaviour (which is also the definition of a snowflake btw, if you look up the dictionary). I gave an example of how non-native English speakers already find it hard to write documentation in English in the first place. Now you want people like us to also take into consideration your "feelings" on what words trigger you and what don't before writing a technical documentation? Seriously? What would you do if I wrote the documentation in my native language instead as I am most comfortable in it? I am already going the extra mile in communicating with you in English. Now you want me to stretch that even more to consider your "feelings" too? How about you and I meet in the middle? I'll write documentation in Kannada (which happens to be my native language), and you put the extra effort to read the documentation in my language or get it translated yourself? Would you be comfortable doing that since you "rather work with snowflakes than bricks". Would that work? If not why not? And if you refuse to understand my "feelings" should I call you a "brick"? Everyone faces difficulties learning stuff in their own way. Some are not even proficient in English to even begin to understand the documentation, let alone discern if "simply" or "just" is triggering them or not. Yet most go through with the struggle without creating a fuss or blaming the author of the documentation (who also might be going through their own struggles).
All I am saying is we all have (as a dev community) much harder and pressing problems to solve. Crying over whether to use "simply" or "just" in documentation is not a battle we should be picking. That's my limited point.
The right, having a meltdown about it: "I'm superior, you're snowflakes, you're pathetic babies, you're weak, I'm a real adult, I'm not afraid, you're triggered by everything, blah blah".
Why does this happen? Why are you so insecure that suggesting a way for documentation to be made clearer makes you conjour up a fantasy about an imaginary group of people who can't learn Russian so that proves they're inferior to you?
Bad analogy. It literally applies to the article itself.
The left: Mailers are really just another way to render a view
The right, having a meltdown over "just" and "simply": Remove "just" and "simply" else it will ruin my flow of thought and is "jolting" to read. It comes off as "condescending", is "upsetting" and "annoying"; removing "it doesn't put people off".
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> Why does this happen? Why are you so insecure that suggesting a way for documentation to be made clearer makes you conjour up a fantasy about an imaginary group of people who can't learn Russian so that proves they're inferior to you?
No where did I say anyone is inferior to me? I said some are snowflakes and get offended by the most random thing imaginable and there is no obligation to cater to everyone's whims and fancies. Who would have thought words like "just" or "simply" can offend anyone? But here we are discussing if words like "easy, painless, straightforward, trivial, simple and just" offend people or not.
Also, the "imaginary group of people" are the ones we never hear about. We only hear about the successful ones who toiled their way to become what they wanted to become without whining about everything along the way. My limited point is: if you really want to whine, there are much better things to whine about than language/tone of innocuous words in the documentation.
There, where you insult people. It seems clear from the context that you are not including yourself in the snowflakes, instead including yourself as superior to the snowflakes. When someone calls someone else stupid or slow or weak or whiner, it's usually in the context of "and I'm better".
> "get offended by the most random thing imaginable and there is no obligation to cater to everyone's whims and fancies."
Whenever you can split the political divide into compassion/cruelty, it's the Left encouraging or supporting compassion and the right siding with "fuck you, got mine". Who, for example, said you had an 'obligation' to write in a particular way? Instead of the article turning into "yeah, okay, no skin off my nose to remove those words" or "I prefer it this way, feel free to write your own version your way", it turns into namecalling, ego protecting, self-defense.
> "The right, having a meltdown over "just" and "simply": Remove "just" and "simply" else it will ruin my flow of thought"
Saying "X is bad because I trip over it" is not melting down. Saying "you trip over X because you're weak and clumsy and a whining crybaby, you'd never survive an Antartic exploration expedition like a True Scotsman, I have no obligation to do what you demand, I don't need to because I don't trip over X" is. It doesn't engage with the actual issue, doesn't consider whether the change has merit more or less than it costs, doesn't reply about why the style is clearer/better/more fun/more personal, it's a reply to show a) the author is in with the tougher more superior crowd who don't need it, b) the requestor is pathetic.
I once saw a video of how astronauts who visit the International Space Station had to learn Russian as everything in the Soyuz was labelled in Russian. Had to even read documentation written in Russian to be able to operate Soyuz optimally. None of these snowflakes would have survived such demanding jobs.
One positive thing about AI revolution and ChatGPT is that we can finally get documentation automated out of the equation and introduce neutral language. This shouldn't even be a problem going forward. A prompt for "Important: rewrite this documentation in as non-offensive way as possible while blacklisting words such as 'just', 'simply'" etc should do the trick.