Subject: Re: bug#61325: 30.0.50; Jokes in GNUS manual

From: Ihor Radchenko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Feb 2023 14:43:06 +0000

Po Lu via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text
editors" <[email-masked]> writes:

>>> 3.16 Group Topics
>>>
>>>     If you read lots and lots of groups, it might be convenient to group
>>>     them hierarchically according to topics.  You put your Emacs groups over
>>>     here, your sex groups over there, and the rest (what, two groups or so?)
>>>     you put in some misc section that you never bother with anyway.  You can
>>>     even group the Emacs sex groups as a sub-topic to either the Emacs
>>>     groups or the sex groups—or both!  Go wild!
>>
>> Thanks.
>> I also partially understand the joke.
>> My main problem is the last sentence, which I am not sure if it is
>> technical or still part of the joke.
>>
>>     You can even group the Emacs sex groups as a sub-topic to either the
>>     Emacs groups or the sex groups—or both!
>>
>> The paragraph structure is basically:
>>
>>  <technical description><joke><half joke, half technical description>
>>
>> Such structure is difficult to understand, especially if the joke itself
>> is not understood.
> ...
>> Not when the jokes stay on the way of understanding the technical parts.
>
> They do not.  End of discussion.

I kindly disagree. 3.16 Group Topics section was difficult to
understand _for me_ precisely because of the jokes. I will elaborate
below.

> Where I come from, it is generally said that a person who deliberately
> tries to find problems with something is trying to ``pick pricks''.
> They are usually able to find some problems, because the problems they
> report tend to, by definition, rely on their own testimony: ``I don't
> understand'', ``I'm offended by'', etc.
>
> Such people generally ruin the day for everyone else wherever they
> appear.

Upon hearing about the problem and checking the specifically indicated
sections in the manual, I tend to agree with the person being offended.
Not because I am not offended (I am not), but because, as I stated
earlier, I believe that jokes should not complicate the understanding.

> Whoever reported the problem with the Gnus manual, which has not seen
> other such reports in over 20 years, certainly sounds like one such
> individual.  And if you don't understand the manual, then it is not a
> problem with the jokes therein.  Just read it again until you do.
> How many people can understand the following sentence without reading it
> at least once or twice?

Absence of bug reports does not imply that the manual is easy to
understand. I do not say that it is incomprehensible, but the examples I
pointed to do make it harder to understand. Won't it be an improvement
to make the manual easier to understand for more people?

>                          XcmsCIELabClipL
>
>   This brings the encountered out-of-gamut color specification into the
>   screen's color gamut by reducing or increasing CIE metric lightness
>   (L*) in the CIE Lab color space until the color is within the
>   gamut. If the Psychometric Chroma of the color specification is beyond
>   maximum for the Psychometric Hue Angle, then while maintaining the
>   same Psychometric Hue Angle, the color will be clipped to the CIE Lab
>   coordinates of maximum Psychometric Chroma. See
>   `XcmsCIELabQueryMaxC'. No client data is necessary.
>
> Is color management, thus, an evil which should be persecuted by hordes
> of crusaders?

I do not see any problem with the provided paragraph. Yes, it contains a
lot of unfamiliar terms, but they appear to be necessary to describe the
technical information. In contrast, jokes do not convey any new
information. They are good to have as an _occasional_ distraction - a
break that may be necessary to simplify understanding; but not good when
they make understanding more difficult.

Imagine a joke inserted into your example, on top of all other
unfamiliar terms:

> This brings the encountered out-of-gamut (not gonad, mind you) color
> specification into the screen's color gamut by reducing or
> increasing (let's not think further) CIE metric lightness (L*) in the
> CIE Lab color space until the color is within (mmm...) the gamut.

Would you find it helpful or at least neutral to have these extra jokes
when trying to understand the above sentence?

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
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