Re: OT (was: Re: Letter to US Sen. Byron Dorgan re unpaid overtime)

From: Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/24/03 

Date: 23 Dec 2003 20:09:32 -0800

"Jos A. Horsmeier" <j.a.horsmeier@wanadoo.nl> wrote in message news:<3fe8c6d2$0$191$1b62eedf@news.wanadoo.nl>...
> "Edward G. Nilges" <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:f5dda427.0312231135.2c110849@posting.google.com...
> > "Jos A. Horsmeier" <j.a.horsmeier@wanadoo.nl> wrote in message news:<3fe76690$0$189$1b62eedf@news.wanadoo.nl>...
> > > "Richard Heathfield" <dontmail@address.co.uk.invalid> wrote in message news:bs7ji0$fts$1@titan.btinternet.com...
> > > > Edward G. Nilges wrote:
>
> > > > > I have discovered that Richard doesn't know (apparently) how compilers
> > > > > work
> > > >
> > > > Have you really? I think that what you actually discovered (because I told
> > > > you) is that I've never written a C compiler. [ ... ]
>
> > > I think I have to respond here too -- [ ... ]
>
> > I'll concede that strlen should not be used in code that needs to be
> > efficient [ ... ]
>
> Bravo. Now we're talking. You know what Edward? For years I've been
> planning to buy a nice old mansion in Spain, in the Extremadura area
> for me and my wife when I'm an old sod. I love Spain and I detest
> those bull fights overthere. You, as you entered this comp.programming
> arena, remind me of those raging bulls -- furious, outrageous and
> tactically stupid (read on before you reply).

While this is an intelligent reply, for a change, it nonetheless comes
from a tribalized culture which can't tolerate dissent. I have said
that programming was tribalized around the birth of C, and I believe
this is because it was demonstrated to the generation of that era that
they would not be able to meaningfully participate in the decisions
that affected their lives.

unix was a passive-aggressive response to the failure of multics to
deliver because rather than taking charge of the problems in multics,
unix was developed separately as a passive-aggressive retreat from
engagement.

It is a typically tribal response to characterise the conflict in such
personal terms, for in fact you do not know much about my emotional
responses to this exchange.

You may imagine that I am all flustered and all upset. But I'd have to
ask how it is that while my interlocutors, despite their gerrymandered
majority, descend into half-literate screeds and the vilest kind of
personal abuse while in the main I remain above (and I mean this quite
seriously) both their literacy levels and bad temper.

If I call a man a *** wad, I do it flippantly and in such a manner
that is quite obviously meant humorously; whereas Richard Heathfield
has without any sense of humor conducted a deliberate campaign of
abuse in which he's lost his temper in public several times.

>
> Your 'opponents' (mind the quotes) are unlike those picadores (those
> nasty wimps that stick little spears in your neck), unlike those
> matadores (those little loonies with a rolled-up hanky in their trousers
> to impress the senorita's) that penetrate your lungs with their fancy
> swords. Those folks overhere are sensible human beings.
>
I don't think they are. I believe they are profoundly isolated and
unhappy human beings, because they have repeatedly jumped on any
chance to inflate a half truth and an unwarranted inference into a
global attack on my personality and competence, one which will
backfire, because of the poor quality of their reasoning.

For example, they inferred from the use of strlen for clarity that I
do not know how C works with strings and that non-optimized compilers
may generate a loop to find the strlen. However, as I've pointed out,
I abandoned C precisely because to effectively store strings I found I
needed to make, buy or steal a pseudo-object which would (of course)
cache the strlen.

I MADE THIS REPEATEDLY CLEAR in 2002.

The program in which the strlen appeared was written in two hours in a
good faith reply to a request by Chris Sonnack, who styles himself
"programmer dude" and who I believe has obsessive-compulsive
personality disorder, because in response to my submission he then
proceeded to obsessively compulsively address micro issues in the C
code which in fact proved my thesis...that C is an unsuitable language
today for development.

Rather than conceding what was my claim, Chris started an Urban Legend
about my competence. I consulted a lawyer on his behavior and that of
Richard Heathfield in that year, and this attorney told me not to
waste resources on a libel lawsuit, because, my attorney said,
internet postings in public access newsgroups have had zero
credibility for many years, starting with the waste of public money
and time with the Clinton impeachment...triggered as it was by the
Internet site operated by Matt Drudge.

My attorney said that given my reputation in face to face professional
encounters, these postings are making Richard and Chris look like
fools and bounders.
 
> I think it's a fact; I've been lurking here for years after I've been
> quite a regular overhere -- this group was (is?) about programming,
> algorithms, no matter what the implementation language happens to be.
> I like that idea, a synergy between people thinking about efficience
> with an occasional digression here and there.
>
> C is quite a language (since the mid-seventies) C++ does fine too,
> Java resembles C and C++ but for us hard core programmer it just
> still smells funny; some Pascalians come in here and Ada-addicts
> hit this group more often than not. But what the ***? (I'm Dutch
> so there's no reason for me to be politically correct).
>
> C is a 'structured assembly language' as has been said often before.
> That's a mixed blessing. You know what Edward? Whenever I write some
> code in C? I can see the machine code shining through it. A lot of
> folks around here can confirm this emotional statement.
>
Despite the fact that I started in machine language, I have never,
ever considered access to machine language "beautiful" or "elegant".
As hero computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra said, "computing science is
no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" and for
this reason I debugged a Fortran compiler in machine language in order
to obtain my first highlevel language.

I was VERY fortunate in fact to encounter the Turing machine before I
had access to a computer because while the Turing machine can of
course be simulated, it is essentially an abstraction, a "star" and
not a telescope.

To stay on the level of an actual machine language is what social
theorists call reification and fetishization in which the popular mind
just confuses things with concepts.

As just one example, I had to add a stack mechanism to a Cobol
program, written as a bill of materials processor, in the 1970s,
because the "expert assembler language" programmer who'd written the
original version had no concept of a nested structure...such as
appears in bills of materials.
 
> C is not a high level language, and it was not intented to be. C is
> a language that shoots you in the foot; but it's a fair language --
> it doesn't stab you in the back, nor doesn't it sell you nasty pills
> or whatever. (C++ sells your mother in law twice if you don't pay
> attention). Every language has its benefits and pitfalls.
>
> You fell into some of C's pitfalls, no reason to deny it. You are
> not a C connoisseur (sp?) You're a proud human being who exhibited
> itself as a silly bull in a Spanish arena. Don't do that; don't call
> strlen() in a loop. Don't trust on 'rep scasbnz' (or whatever) don't
> claim you know about LL(k) or LARL(k) parsers, don't go for the

In fact I had the opportunity to study parsers in compiler design
"301" in graduate school, using Aho et al.'s "Dragon Book", which
discusses the algorithms you mention. In fact, I never mentioned those
types of parsers, and what I did claim was that I write "recursive
descent" parsers by hand in preference to yacc because having been
exposed to a good rd parser (in the form of the Bell Northern Research
SL-1 compiler, which I rewrote for 24 bits) I find it simpler to use a
good editor to generate the rd parser from the BNF.

> 'visual basic solves enterprise problems'; don't act like a silly bull;

It does so only if managed by the workers themselves.

You are essentially saying the following: "don't have opinions at
variance with the group, and don't assert agency."

This is a "tribal" statement because the tribe feels itself to be a
center of resistance to power which doesn't let it participate
meaningfully in the decisions which affect its lives. The tribe feels
to seek out and to destroy any outlier element who is perceived as
asserting bourgeois individuality because for the tribal members, the
bourgeois individual is no more, and for the posters in this ng, he
represents an absent father.

I have learned that Richard Heathfield does not have a university
degree. While I perfectly understand that such a man could be a
well-educated person, I have concluded that at no time has he had the
opportunity to live in a collegial atmosphere.

Instead (and I am very sad for Richard in this regard) he was pushed
into the work force, as I was after university but before completing
graduate studies, and he learned thuggish and unseemly behavior. He
learned to be a pit bull.

Whereas I was privileged to attend university in the USA, which
doesn't have the UK's classist educational system, and to work for
five years at Princeton. Especially at the latter venue, I learned
that courtesy is the only way to communicate complex matters. Richard
doesn't know how to post with courtesy: Richard has constantly
intimidated entry-level posters: and Richard, for this reason, fails
to see his own limits.

He has no concept of the way in which productive discourse takes place
when you don't take, and run with, a practice (such as using strlen in
a loop) which you THINK indicates incompetence, but which was in fact
only an attempt to make the intent of a two-hour example piece of code
clear, written while taking time out from my consulting and authoring
activities and in response to a request.

And he imagines that my sense of self-worth is based on an
employability which he thinks he threatens, as if employability of us
all is not under global threat by laissez-faire. Any employer who does
a usenet search on a person and concludes from postings anything at
all is simply not worth working for, and Richard, insofar as he thinks
to damage my employability, needs to realize this.

You are in short confused about who is the matador, who is the
picador, and who is de brave bool. Your analogy sux, because de brave
bool is eliminated and given the nature of usenet, I cannot be
eliminated.
>
> think.
>
> kind regards,
>
> Jos