Pseudonyms lead to uncivil forums?

I am late to realize, but apparently, Google Plus is requiring a real names only. They go so far as to shut down accounts that are using a name they are suspicious of, and they're doing a lot of collateral damage to people with legal names that happen to sound funny.

The battle for "real names" is one that I have a hard time understanding. Partially this is because it is impossible to indicate which names are "real". Is it ones on legal papers? On a credit card or bank account? Ones people call you all the time? Partially it is that I started using forums at an impressionable age. Online forums are filled with pseudonyms and they work just fine. Hobbit and Ghostcrawler are the real names of real people in my world. It's all so normal and good that I have a hard time understanding why someone would want to shut it down.

Let me take a try at it, though, because I think it's important that pseudonymity thrive on the Internet.

The most common defense I hear for a real-names policy is that it improves the quality of posts in a forum. That's the reason Blizzard used when they announced they would require real names only on their official forums. As far as I can understand, the idea is that a "real name" gives some sort of accountability that a pseudonym does not.

There is much to say on this, but often a simple counter-example is the strongest evidence. Here are the first four Warcraft guilds I could find, by searching around on Google, that have online forums viewable by the public.

• Sunder
  
• Dark Pact
  
• Immortal
  
• Gods of Warcraft
  

Feel free to peruse them and see what a forum is like without real names. At a glance, I don't see a single real name. Everyone is posting using names like Brophy, Porcupinez, and Nytetia. As well, after skimming a few dozen posts, I didn't find a single one that is uncivil. In fact, the overall impression I get is one of friendliness. Camaraderie. Just plain fun.

The tone of these forums is not surprising if you think about the relationship the members of a guild have with each other. This is just the sort of thing you see over and over again if you participate in Internet forums. It is just the kind of thing that will be shut down under a real names policy.

Teach your build tool jars, not classes

As far as I can tell, the single compelling feature about ant as a build system is that it makes it easy to compile Java. I just encountered a wiki page where SCons developers are discussing some of the problems.

One of the problems is this:

Currently the DAG built by SCons is supposed to have knowledge about every single generated file so that the engine can work out which files need transformation. In a world where there is 1 -> 1 relationship between source file and generated file (as with C, C++, Fortran, etc.) or where there is 1 -> n relationship where the various n files can be named without actually undertaking the compilation, things are fine. For Java, and even more extremely for languages like Groovy, it is nigh on impossible to discover the names of the n files without running the compiler -- either in reality or in emulation.

It's actually worse. It's not really a 1->n compile. The 1 file on the left can only be compiled by consulting other input files, and if any of those files change, you also need to recompile. Determining the exact dependency graph is a rather complicated problem.

I believe such a graph is unavoidable and indispensable if you want to have a decent build tool. "Decent" is subjective, but surely anyone would say that rebuilds should be reliable. You don't generally get that with ant. If you are building with ant, your have probably gotten very familiar with "ant clean".

To address Java's build problems without having to use ant, what I do is set up my build files in terms of jar files rather than directories of class files. If you do that, then even though the Java or Scala compiler produces loads of class files, the build tool doesn't actually see them. They are created in a temporary directory, combined into a jar, and then the temporary directory is deleted. While it's true that you don't get the optimal rebuild this way if you change just one file, I'd usually use an IDE if I am repeatedly editing the files of a single Java or Scala module. If I change just one file at random, I'd prefer to have a safe rebuild than the absolute fastest one.

In principle you can update the build tool to accurately model all the class files. Ant's depend task does so, and the Simple Build Tool uses a scalac plugin to track dependencies. While I don't have experience with the SBT version, I have found the ant version to significantly slow down compiles and yet still not be completely reliable. I prefer to stick with jar files and have the build tool be reliable. Besides, you shouldn't have to use a particular build tool just because your project includes some code in some particular language. It doesn't scale as soon as you add a second language to the project.