Company in the Front Hall

There is a response from Caveat Lector to responses to yesterday's question.

The author promises a later report on ulterior motives (my favorite kind of motives!), and discusses a few of the responses that were received.

Now I wish I'd actually had a conclusion (as opposed to winding up with "yeah, I dunno if teaching databases is a good idea or not--ooh, look, a metaphor!").

I should have emailed in some sort of creative answer such as "because we like databases, and want to share the love! How will they ever learn to adore Boolean operators if we don't teach them?"

She does express sharp scorn for one argument that I touched on:

One response in particular… well. “They have to do lots of stuff in college they’ll never have to do again. Why not this too?” People. PEOPLE. That is not a reason. That is an excuse. I expect better from my tribe.

Ouch.

Although as far as I know Caveat Lector* does not read this blog and was not referring to me personally, I would nevertheless like to state in my defense (and that of anyone else to whom it applies) that I did not say this was a good reason to teach databases, only that it was not necessarily a good reason not to, if there was some demonstrable value gained.

I stand by this as a valid distinction.

I should also note that as a teacher of databases to graduate students, I today experienced a heartwarming bit of geek satisfaction when a student assignment included references to truncation!--and the aforementioned Boolean operators!

I can't really argue that this incident is a good reason in itself, though. My geek satisfaction is clearly very important to everyone, but I do recognize that it's not the primary consideration in every single decision.

Well, I'm certainly staying tuned for more on the ulterior motives.

5/4/09

*Edited to note that by this I of course mean the author of Caveat Lector. Caveat Lector itself, as the title of a blog, presumably does not read anything. I do this sort of metonymy in my head all the time, essentially naming the author after the blog, but it's not exactly an accurate description of reality.

I think it comes from a perhaps misplaced sense of blog-privacy, where it seems almost impolite to mention a person's name (after all, they publish under such-and-such heading--that must be what they want to be called!).

If the blog is anonymous, this is pretty much the only option (and maybe that's where I got into the habit), but in cases like Caveat Lector, or, indeed, this blog, where there's an actual person's name attached to it, it becomes a little more interesting.

Is it more polite to use a person's actual name, even though other readers online may then have no idea which blog you're talking about? To use both the name and the blog title? To do what I do, and conflate blog title and person?

Let's not even talk about blogs with multiple named authors, for to tread there brings madness.

It is possible that the etiquette has not yet been completely established. Someone should become the Miss Manners of blogs!

Not me, though.