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

[Attempt #2. If by some miracle the first attempt gets through after all,
please pass over this essentially duplicate reply.]

spinoza1111 said:

On Dec 30, 2:50 am, Richard Heathfield <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<snip>

Caveat: the page weighs in at around 90KB, and my upload speed is only
around 448Kbps max, so it might take several seconds for people to grab
it if the server is busy doing other stuff at the time.

90KB. Wow. And I thought I was verbose.

You are. That's why it's 90KB.

And, of course, you made sure
to create read-only pages offline to the discussion, and not converse
here.

If you think I'm giving a verbose pseud write access to my server, dream
on. Discussions are what Usenet is good at.

And the server is from Radio Shack, or *** Smith, or Earl's
Court Computer Bazaar.

Actually, it was a gift from a friend, who built it specially for me.

How very convenient.

It is convenient in some ways, but not in others, to have one's Web server
sat under one's desk.

You only have to cite it, and you do not have to be exposed.

I don't understand that sentence. The page simply archives two Usenet
articles from a 2003 discussion that is in danger of being misrepresented.
Consider it an excerpt of historical data. If you think that the page
itself misrepresents the discussion, feel free to archive articles
yourself on your own Web site. Nobody is stopping you.

I have a suggestion. If you have a copy of Beautiful Code (O'Reilly
Media, 2007) or you can get your paws on one at Foyle's, why don't you
read the article at the pub or chip shop on your break, and tell me if
you agree or disagree with my thesis, that Rob Pike's 1998 code in the
first essay is not Beautiful?

I've seen a fair amount of Rob Pike's code, and it looks pretty good to me.
Not necessarily how I'd have done it, but that's almost always a matter of
style, I guess.

And I've seen a fair amount of your code, too. *Therefore*, the probability
of my agreeing with your opinion about the quality of Rob Pike's code is
vanishingly small. To say this, I do not need to see the code itself. If
Chris Torek or Ben Pfaff or Doug Gwyn were criticising Rob Pike's code,
that would be another matter. Even though I don't always agree with their
opinions, I respect those opinions enough to treat them seriously, because
those people have earned that respect. But you have given me no reason to
have any respect at all for your opinions about programming or indeed
about anything at all.

You have told me, for example, that C is fully aware of international
strings.

No, I have told you that C99 addressed the problem of insufficient support
for wchar_t in C90. C doesn't care all that much about "international
strings" - to C, they're just strings, and if the implementation wants
them to be international, that's fine by C.

But when I try to re-use this code in .Net, it can't be
called directly from C Sharp using a String object, because its
interface appears in C Sharp as consisting of sbyte arrays.

C was there long before C#. If C specified an interface to every
fly-by-night language that came along, the printed form of ISO/IEC 9899
would need several bookshelves. If C# wants to interface to C, it's C#'s
responsibility to specify how that can be done; if the interface is
inadequate, take it up with Microsoft.

<snip>

As I've pointed out, Richard, you do seem at times to deal in hand-
waving, time-saving folklore in which Rumour enters painted full of
tongues (Shakespeare, Henry IV part 2) to settle disputes, speaking
darkly of pages on servers in the middle of the woods. I suggest that
this generates ill-feeling towards you and exerts a chilling effect on
freedom of speech.

You're the one who is saying things like "stay away", "I want you to stay
away from discussions in which I participate", "I don't want to see
you here", "Stop posting replies to my posts, jerk" - so it seems that it
is you who are attempting (and, it must be said, failing) to exert a
chilling effect on freedom of speech.

How about it, Dickon?

My name is not Dickon. Name-calling is "jejune", as you love to say. If you
want to be treated like a grown-up, try acting like one.

--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
.

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