I don't think that it was inflammatory. Maybe it's due to wildly unchecked privilege, but I read it as "A way to convey the REST metaphor to a nontechnical person". I didn't see it as "women are stupid and need handholding to understand technology".
* The dialog was entirely unrealistic- to the point that a 'dialogue' was clearly simply the wrong form for what Tomayko wanted to do
* the 'wife' was portrayed alternatively as infantile, naive and purely reactive.
I follow Ryan Tomayko vaguely and I'd be surprised if this was a reflection of his behaviour. From what little I know he seems to have some awareness of and sympathy with struggles that come under "left politics".
But my knowing that doesn't erase the issues with his original post.
My comment on the original posting was thus:
> So Ryan Tomayko's conversions with his wife are akin in tone and style to a language textbook aimed at tweens?
You can't have that coupled with "wife" and simply wave away the problematic implications, not in our culture as of stands today. It's admirable that Tomayko is mature enough to consider challenges like this - instead of just going on the ultra defensive MRA spiel like some Redditor.
I might try to pull it out of cache and then reconsider.
> p: Ugghh. I have to admit, this post does seem kind of sexist now that you mention it. It never occured to me that it might be taken as such. I didn’t mean to imply my wife was a layperson due to her being female. I use “explained to my wife” at work as a simple way of saying that something is being described in a way that you might be able to explain to layperson (like people who make buying decisions :) Of course, everyone at work knows that my wife is non-technical and also that she is one of the only people outside of work I get to have grown-up conversations with.
>
>> Dude, your wife must really love you to go through all that which was obviously of way more interest to you than to her!
>
> There’s a bit of context missing from the beginning of the post: I had been busy at work and hadn’t seen her much in the past week or so. When that happens she starts getting jealous of the laptop and wants to hover over my shoulder — that’s a sign, it means: put it down and pay attention to me. If I don’t heel to that hint, she’ll start asking me about whatever’s on the screen. If I’m lucky it’s vim and a terminal running screen, which freaks her out and she leaves. Otherwise, I’m usually in the browser or my newsreader. It just so happened that at this time, I was reading Roy’s Bio so she saw his picture and says, “Who is Roy Fielding??!?,” using the exact the same tone and inflection you might when saying “WTF?”
>
> When this happens, I usually just say, “Oh, it’s nothing,” or something like, “it’s just some stuff about a thing.”
>
> Anyway, the funny thing is that I wasn’t really trying to explain anything at first. It started out as a bit of joke — a be careful what you ask for type thing. But then she says, “Oh, I get it.” and I so I kept on going and the next thing I know we’re talking about polymorphism and URL canonicalization and all kinds of crazy shit.
>
> She gets me going on purpose just so she can see my arms waving and the vein pop out of my head while I’m trying to describe this stuff. I don’t think she really pays all that much attention to what I’m actually saying.
This also explains the tone that some have complained is unrealistic: She was not trying to have a serious discussion about technology, but to wind him up.
Maybe including that as an introduction to the article would have pacified some of the complaints, but the comment I've quoted above was posted in 2006 as the 6th comment on the post. It's really ridiculous that he kept getting complaints about this post.
I considered that an article that took a real discussion (I assume he did explain it to his wife) that wasn't recorded, wrote it up in a way that resembles a conversation in which the wife is the one the explanation is targeted.
The article wasn't about his wife, for all I care about. Replace it with 'son', 'father', 'drinking buddy' and the article format could've been the same. The author expands that train of thought that helped him explain the topic at hand in a recent conversation, the other party is merely a placeholder for the real thing that took place before.
Actually, it reminded me a little of teacher/scholar type of 'dialoges', not Socrates, not Master Wq from the vim koans, but something inbetween and related. It was a frame for the real content - and in my world not at all offending.
If I tried explaining REST to my mom or some of the non-technical guys at the gym, for example, it'd have taken vastly more explanation.
Frankly I consider taking it down like this cowardly. If he wanted to address these "concerns" then replace "(my) wife" with "Bob" or something else and add a line that "some people took offense to the original version, so I've changed it to avoid taking the focus away from the purpose" or something to that effect.
How exactly did you read it that way without any knowledge about his wife's background?
By implicitly assuming "wife => woman => nontechnical", that's how. That's really what makes the title work.
No, it doesn't. Could be a little brother who's just written his first PHP script. Could be a big brother who's worked for 20 years as DBA. Lots of articles out there trying to explain REST to such people.
But wife? That means "nontechnical" - just look at the comments here.
Making the subject "brother", "sister", "mom", "dad", or "husband" has the exact same meaning to me--they are all anonymous relations and so the "non-technical" implication still carries. The subject the author chose was "wife", presumably because this was based on an actual conversation with his wife.
The subject does have a chance to turn the implication around. If your brother worked for 20 years as a DBA then the title would have to be "Explaining REST to a DBA" to get the correct implication.
Because you can be technically inclined without perfect knowledge of REST? As I wrote: lots of articles do that. This article was very popular exactly because of the "totally non-technical" aspect.
> The subject does have a chance to turn the implication around. If your brother worked for 20 years as a DBA then the title would have to be "Explaining REST to a DBA" to get the correct implication.
And this article could be equally clear with the title "How I Explained REST to someone completely non-technical" or even "How I Explained REST to My (non-technical) Wife" - but that is not the title it had.