Re: Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy, maybe I'm scum

On Dec 29, 10:10 pm, Randy Howard <randyhow...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Sat, 29 Dec 2007 06:57:25 -0600,spinoza1111wrote
(in article
<e46245c6-29cb-4337-b16d-184647c3f...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

Somewhere in here the attributions to CBF's comments got waxed...





On Dec 29, 3:58 pm, Randy Howard <randyhow...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On Sat, 29 Dec 2007 01:12:21 -0600,spinoza1111wrote
(in article
<8712e837-59e1-4161-ac43-9735a14d8...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

On Dec 29, 6:37 am, CBFalconer <cbfalco...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
spinoza1111wrote:
Randy Howard <randyhow...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
spinoza1111wrote

When I had started working at Princeton University's Information
Centers in 1987, my boss at a reception for alumni student Info
Center workers said to me, Ed, this is *Brian Kernighan*.

Nilgewater is back again.

This time, Mr. Howard, your compulsive stalking will not be
tolerated.

PLONK

Good, you do that. And stay away if you plan on bullying people here.

A rational person might determine that when you try to tell people what
to do, it is you that is doing the bullying.

This is complete nonsense.

No it is not.  You told him to "stay away", as if you somehow have such
authority.  Perhaps since you were in his killfile this made you feel
like you had "told him off" without him ever seeing it.  

Yeah, stay away, since you're a stalker and a cyberbully with nothing
to contribute here.

Is your boss a bully? Or does money talk?

Relevance?

He tells you what to do. Of course, you do so. You're easily bought.

Or, if you're self-employed, is your client a bully? Or does money
talk?

Relevance?

See above.

The bully, whose prototype is indeed Hitler

False.  They were around long before Hitler, and I think you need a
better dictionary.

I think you're aliterate, for the prototype or ideal can of course
come after the actuality. Hint: crack a book other than a dictionary,
such as a Marxist critique of Platonism.


[reams of nilgewater snipped]

We all recall your foolish attempt to add your private word to
wikipedia, and we all recall that on my request, your vandalism was
erased.

Not once, to my recollection and to my knowledge, did you in 2003
contribute anything positive to the discussion.

Apparently you forget all the efforts (which admittedly appear to have
failed) to teach you something about your horrifically bad code you
posted, and your mistaken (proven by benchmark data) beliefs about what
"magic" the optimizer would do for you (demonstrated to be false) to
save what can only be described is childishly naive logic, to which you
imagined a C compiler would save you from yourself.

You didn't even participate in these efforts, jejune as they were, and
focused as they were not on "benchmarks" but on petty stylistic
prejudices and the resentment of a literate style in programming, the
only style possible for creating large systems as opposed to snippets.
You discovered them, and as a bully, you pounced on their target
because you have psychological problems and a shaky sense of self.


Instead, you stalked me, and your observations on programming seemed
to me deliberately jejune so as to avoid the risk of being found wrong.

False.  The discussion focused for far too long on trying to show you,
through code examples, analysis of your own code which was posted here,
and through benchmarking examples and results (on multiple compilers,
hardware architectures and operating systems) of exactly why your
assumptions were incorrect.  When faced with such, you did you
nilgewater routine, which is often indistinguishable from the
"postmodernism generator" in an attempt to use persiflage as cover for
incompetent code decisions.

Again, you never participated in any such discussion. Such
"discussion" as existed focused on the problems I knew would occur in
my use of C for I'd abandoned it years ago as a child's language, and
that discussion was conducted by Programmer Dude and Richard
Heathfield with reasonable courtesy in the first part of 2003.

You then entered the discussion, and plagiarized it, and mis-
represented it, for as a person who fears weakness in himself,
probably as the result of military post-traumatic stress, it enraged
you to see someone simultaneously admit where he'd erred AND insist on
a literate programming style, and a writing style about programming
which links programming to broader concerns. You saw in me a freedom
and flexibility which, I believe, has been beaten out of you.

You created hundreds of texts, each an actionable cause of libel,
without a single constructive or original thought.


You based your
campaign on some assertions and a Web page created by Programmer Dude
which in turn addressed mostly unprovable and undecidable issues of
programming style, which were neither verifiable nor falsifiable.

Incorrect.

No, you based your campaign on some assertions and a Web page created
by Programmer Dude which in turn addressed mostly unprovable and
undecidable issues of programming style, which were neither verifiable
nor falsifiable. Where'd I'd been mistaken, I admitted the mistake,
and in the case of the major bug, for which Programmer Dude claimed
credit, I'd discovered this and posted a fix on the same evening the
original code was posted.

I'd taken the risk, as I take here, in being wrong, as people did in
the old "structured walkthrough" (which has been pretty much
eliminated by corporate bullying), to verify my opinions about the
superiority of OO, and here, I am concerned about Pike's code. You
entered strictly to "tell me what to do", which was mostly, get
fucked.

If you wish to persist with exercising your right to "selective memory
disorder", go ahead, but the archives show different.  Little about OO
versus whatever will provide cover for "gee, this guy is just too
stupid to figure out how and when to hoist a loop invariant".  

As I explained at the time, since optimizing compilers hoist loop
invariants, that's in general not a good idea from the standpoint of
readable code, since each "work" variable represents a deficiency from
the standpoint of clarity. Indeed, you, as a person incapable of
original thought, use a big word for a subhuman and automatable
operation in order to impress your moron friends.

It was pointed out to me correctly, but not by you, that the
termination condition in the c for is, in an old-fashioned and clumsy
way, evaluated each time control passes to the top of the for loop. As
someone who used C heavily at Princeton for a variety of tasks until I
realized that C was completely inadequate to my growing need for
ontology (object orientation), I was fully aware of those semantics in
1990; indeed, those semantics, which are in themselves wildly
inefficient, and which in themselves give the lie to Kernighan's being
truly a first rate scientist, as does his essay in Beautiful Code,
were part of my reason for abandoning C.

When in 2003 I returned to C to analyze the relative performance of OO
Visual Basic and raw C, share the results, and give and receive
CONSTRUCTIVE criticism here, I'd been using a by value for termination
condition for the most part for several years in a language then and
now vastly superior to C.

My error as regards the semantics of C was precisely what I'd come to
learn, but instead of being merely corrected in a collegial spirit, I
was harassed and hounded by the relatively amateur bullies Programmer
Dude and Richard Heathfield, who are probably afraid of the outside
world and compensate here by feeling like experts. However, they made
useful comments.

You then entered as the exchange was dying down and WITHOUT MAKING ANY
CONTRIBUTIONS, you plagiarized their work solely to harass and bully,
and in violation of Federal law concerning cyberstalking and
harassment.

Here, I've keyed in Brian's code and struggled to adapt it to C+
+ .Net, which as a modern development platform only painfully supports
"strings" of 8-bit bytes (as theorised by Pike, as late as 1998, as
the only "strings" worth a white man's time, I suppose). I've written
and am debugging a parallel version to C sharp to, I anticipate, show
that there is little or no performance penalty FOR BEING MINIMALLY
CORRECT, and you, sir, are wasting my time.

You have manifested zero interest in programming in these threads. In
your case, and to a lesser extent in the cases of Heathfield and the
Dude, your hatred makes you clinically anhedonic, which I suppose I
will have to translate for you as incapable of feeling other than
negative emotions, especially your rage, which, again, I believe is
the result of military post-traumatic stress, and which needs to be
brought, as I said in 2004, to the attention of your local police
department...especially given the murder festival that was Amerikkka
in 2007, with multiple mass killings committed by anger mismanagement
cases.


This type of "telling people what to do" is bullying and stalking, and
this time around I'm not going to put up with that *** from you or
anyone else.

No, telling people what to do is saying things like "stay away".  This
time around, will you also be a hypocrite, or was that the last example
of it for a while?

Stay away from me. Stop posting replies to my posts, jerk, Other
people have pointed out that the stylistic and technical debates were
irresolvable, and they asked you and me in 2004 to cease exchanging
posts. In the interests of the community, I did so, but you never
listened and now, three years on, you have automatically restarted an
exchange.

Because you did not conform to the request made by others, I no longer
shall heed that request, and I shall reply, either at length or in
brief, to each one of your hatred-filled posts, thereby creating a
larger and larger deposition for the attorneys in a libel suit that
you're asking for.

--
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those
 who have not got it."  - George Bernard Shaw- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

.

Quantcast