Re: To Richard Heathfield: enough's enough

From: Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/26/03 

Date: 26 Dec 2003 10:56:02 -0800

Richard Heathfield <invalid@address.co.uk.invalid> wrote in message news:<3febf557@news2.power.net.uk>...
> Edward G. Nilges wrote:
>
> > "Malcolm" <malcolm@55bank.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
> > news:<bsdhpl$em7$1@news7.svr.pol.co.uk>...
>
> >> No-one's perfect and we all have hangups about our adequacies. However
> >> the ng is for discussion of technical programming issues. If you are
> >> going to bring politics into it (logocentism and C syntax) then you risk
> >> alienating other posters. maybe you feel that political and technical
> >> issues can't usefully be separated. All I can say is that that is a
> >> fairly idiosyncratic view you can't expect most people to share.
> >
> > They are not "usefully separated" in practice. Instead a dominant
> > ideology (such as the very silly idea that a grown man with high
> > skill, albeit in a narrow range, should develop videogames) informs
> > the technology.
>
> I *think* Malcolm writes video games for a living. There's a market for
> them, so I see no harm in his meeting that demand, and I don't see it as a
> silly idea at all. But you do. Are you trying to insult /every/
> correspondent on this newsgroup? Is this some kind of Wowbaggeresque
> attempt to insult the universe? (If you don't know who Wowbagger was, feel
> free to delete the word.)

Paulina Borsook has a little book you should read, called
Cyberselfish, about the real culture of programming which to her is
unfeeling, overcompetitive for no good reason, and profoundly selfish.
In it, she quotes a 50 year old developer who has to miss his
daughter's birthday because he's working on a video game.

Game programming teaches overemphasis on efficiency and a culture of
violence which makes people into blamers-of-victims and political
conservatives who (1) support violence by default internationally and
domestically as a solution to all problems and (2) are encouraged by
the epistemology of computer games to believe lies (such as Blair's
and Bush's lies about Iraq) as long as the lies are packaged properly.

Game programming also un-teaches any senstivity to practical user
needs since there is no user, only a player.

I'm not trying to "insult" anyone except insofar as he is not able to
make a critical distance between himself and his profession or an
artifact like the C language.

>
> >> for(i=0;i<strlen(str);i++) is a typical newbie mistake in C. You might
> >> say
> >
> > In my case it was a mistake ONLY if the code was intended to be what
> > it was not,
>
> It was a mistake if the code was intended to be used in some way. If the
> code was not intended to be used in some way, why write it?
>
This is alienation, for your concern is exclusively operational. My
concern was understanding the deficiencies of the C language, of which
the strlen is but one.
 
> > and it was an oldbie mistake, because I'd used C several
> > years without of course putting strlen in for statements,
>
> I don't believe you.
>
> > and (sigh)
> > had been selected to advise the real-life protagonist of A Beautiful
> > Mind on C and (eye roll) been selected to design and deliver C classes
> > at Princeton.
>
> I don't believe that either. If it's true, whoever selected you presumably
> regretted their mistake. I trust it was corrected as soon as possible.

What a nasty little man you are.

>
> <same ol' same ol' about telescopes snipped>
>
> >> The other fallacy is to rest an argument solely on authority. Now I can
> >> say "I've heard from the physicists that energy comes in quanta. No I
> >> don't understand the mathematics or the experimental evidence, but I know
> >> that most physicists accept this." However someone somewhere has got to
> >> be able to give an argument based on the authorithy's reasons for holding
> >> this opinion.
> >
> > Which I did in the case of O(n).
>
> No, you didn't. Re-read the relevant thread.
>
> >> Once you realise that C calls the inner expression of a for loop on
> >> every iteration, you'd have to be pretty dense not to realise that
> >> for(i=0;i<strlen(str);i++)
> >> is likely to be O(N*N).
> >
> > Yeah, when I coded it, I thought, hmm, minor case of O(n*n).
>
> That's not what the thread history shows. In fact, based on your
> "contributions" to the discussion so far, I think it's a lie.
>
> > But hmm
> > how long are my strings? Oh yes, on the order of 20 characters.
>
> You presented the code as a general solution to the problem of
> string-splitting. Nowhere did your documentation say "this code must not be
> used on strings longer than 20 characters".
>
No, I did not. I presented it as a general PROBLEM which shows the
deficiencies of the C language, and you know this.

In fact, the vision of the Algol team was that the language would be
an "ideal" language in a midcentury philosophical sense, such that
intelligent people would not make elementary and indeed clerical
errors in the language because of the lack of a tradesman's or clerk's
knowledge of deficiencies.

They did not preclude the idea of professional programming, but the
legacy writings of a Dijkstra indicate that the very idea that
uneducated people (without the moxie to even be autodidacts) should
(1) parade a false and artificial "expertise" about how to overcome
deficiencies in the small, (2) lack the architectonic skills of a
Stroustrup, which skills tend to replace the bad paradigm, and (3) act
as if their stunted, troll-like "expertise" is the only "expertise"
worth the name.

You are an intelligent person, Mr. Heathfield, and you are aware of
the deficiencies of the C language. But you lack the simple courage to
do as I did in 1992, and stop using C because of your petty bourgeois
fear that you might lose clients or job opportunities.

Instead, you have developed an UNNECESSARY field, which is "how to get
around the problems in C", a major time-waster in these newsgroups.

This would be harmless fun, but you make knowledge of the arcana of
that field conditional for being able to post in comp.programming. I
would have had your ass in court last year were it not for my
attorney's advice, that opinions like yours are ignored.

Leave this newsgroup and take your expertise to comp.lang.c. Until the
death of unix, and the messy death of linux in a court of law, your
expertise is needed, but thereafter I suggest another line of work.

> > Hmm, I
> > am posting this program in two hours to the comp.programming ng where
> > C is a lingua franca, but some lurkers may not know C. Therefore I
> > shall use strlen because this is the ONLY way to communicate the
> > intent of the code clearly.
>
> Nobody was telling you not to use strlen. Your mistake was to use it in a
> loop condition. In fact, it was worse than that, because you actually
> called it several times per iteration.
>
And, each time, the strlen iterated over strings that were bounded
both by the common sense of the user of the propositional logic
program and physical limits imposed by most operating systems on the
order of 2^8-1.

For this reason, to store the string length would have detracted from
the clarity of what was intended to be an example to no good reason.

 
> > Had I known how many frigging LUNATICS reside in this nuthouse, I
> > would have compared to Nul.
>
> Just one that I can see, Mr Nilges. Comparing to the null character within
> the condition would /not/ have solved the problem.

Izzat so, Mister Science? Kindly present a loop that does.

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