Re: Letter to US Sen. Byron Dorgan re unpaid overtime

From: Edward G. Nilges (spinoza1111_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/28/03 

Date: 28 Dec 2003 08:36:56 -0800

CBFalconer <cbfalconer@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<3FED70FC.48F6CC74@yahoo.com>...
> Richard Heathfield wrote:
> > Edward G. Nilges wrote:
> >
> ... snip ...
> >
> > > But to regard such trivia as important is in fact the reason
> > > for the 80% failure rate of enterprise systems.
> >
> > Are you really claiming that massively increasing the runtime
> > will decrease the failure rate? You are SO funny it's untrue.
> > You should be on TV.
>
> Here I really have to defend Eddie. To make the trends obvious,

My name is Edward G. Nilges. Common courtesy, which you would extend
to me if you were not a thug and coward hiding behind a modem, does
dictate that you accede to this request NOW, punk.

And Richard made a simple logical blunder. We knew how bad his logic
is when he told us about argument from authority.

He infers from my claim that overemphasis on microefficiency leads to
large enterprise system failure, a true and arguable claim that has
appeared before, to a claim that lengthening the runtime will decrease
the failure rate.

I claimed in other words that p leads to q...p implies q: overemphasis
on microefficiency CAUSES failure, for the very good reason that
"nobody's minding the store": they are too busy creating completely
useless temporary variables, in an obsessive-compulsive fashion, for
strings bounded at 32 characters.

But, of course, deliberately making an extra effort to create slow
code, say by adding random sleep(n) instructions, would have the same
effect as obsessive-compulsive micro-efficiency. That's because in
both cases, the programmer is just wasting time.

Instead, I urged a focus on meaning as was seen in the use of a strlen
to represent, in code meant primarily to communicate, string length,
rather than an obfuscatory test.

But I sense in this ng a hatred of meaning itself. For example, in May
2002, I posted code which had the meaning "this is a compiler which
does a truth table". Not one poster even asked what the code was for,
and several, it seems to me, feel qualified to judge the code without
clue one as to why you'd construct a truth table in propositional
logic in the first place.

The hatred of meaning emerged for example in the recommendation that
the poster with the timing bug basically punt, and remove code, and
try stuff out until the bug goes away, and angry dismissals of any
reflection on how fork might actually work, whether it actually and
instantaneously starts the fork process such that the wait might not,
in some cases, complete before all child processes even start, as at
best "academic".

Basically the hatred of meaning is a self-hatred insofar as human
beings construct a narrative. There's a childish rage here to "just
code" in such a manner that the machine just blindly "runs" in some
unexamined way.

Thus it is inferred that the claim, that micro-efficiency causes
failure in the large, can be mechanically transformed to the claim
that deliberately slow code will be more efficient, as if there was no
moment at which we were able to reflect, independent of a programming
language, on meaning per se.

In 2000, the state of Florida threw hundreds of responsible citizens
off the electoral rolls in part because at a data base firm,
programmers and data analysts kept on expanding "fuzzy" name matching
when asked to do so by Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State. They
did so even when the matches were without meaning until Harris was
certain that she'd excluded enough potential Democratic voters so as
to deliver Florida.

This would be truly "not relevant to programming" if both the left and
right were in agreement that data systems need to be accurate and
correspond to reality. However, the experience in Communist countries
was that a hegemonic political party generally uses information
systems to cover up, conceal and to control, and gradually reduces the
independence and critical spirit of people who actually produce
information.

Today, parties like the Republicans in the USA, the Labour elite in
the UK (a species of Tory) and the Christian Democrats in Italy have
been in power so long that potential scandals have accumulated,
therefore it's in their interest that information workers think in an
ever more dumbed down and noncritical way, and take out their anger on
safe targets.

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