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

On Sun, 30 Dec 2007 22:08:03 -0600, spinoza1111 wrote
(in article
<db704ed1-f7e9-428e-82b5-751bfd0829c8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

[nilgewater snipped yet again, try to focus on anything remotely
technical that comes forth]

It quite obviously /was/ brought to your attention, because you replied
(quite long-windedly) to several of the posts, plus started hammering
my email inbox with even longer versions, along with a ridiculous claim
that your rights were being violated.

It wasn't "bad" code, dearest Randy.

It was actually, the fact that you still fail to realize it is
disappointing.

30 seconds in front of a google search engine pointed at this newsgroup
will cough up the details.  Several people downloaded the code and
posted the results.  If you wish to pretend that you never saw them,
that's fine, but the data is there if you are not afraid to look.

Oh yes, the performance comparision. I wasn't addressing performance.

No, you assumed, and admitted so, that the compiler would address it
all for you. That is but one aspect of the "code" in question, but one
for which we at least managed to focus on technical realities, and not
subjective opinion, like the other debates over hungarian variable
naming, which you seem to have abandoned somewhat in your recent
posting here.

I was addressing reliable and transparent code

Since it wasn't reliable, given bugs were pointed out which you
actually /did/ admit to, and "transparent" is a buzzword, especially
here, since your meaning doesn't meet reality. Transparent code by any
rational meaning doesn't make experienced programmers sit up and say
"what in the hell is this guy thinking here??".

It's not a buzzword, it's a word that has been used in the industry for
/at least/ 25 years, probably much longer, and not only that, the word,
unlike much of CS terminology, is actually very descriptive of the
action taken.

I don't think you've been in the industry that long.

a) I didn't say I was.
b) You have no idea whether I have or not, just as I have no idea
whether you are 15 or 85. Such are the perils of remote
unauthenticated discourse.
c) It doesn't matter anyway.

I was
professionally involved in the industry from 1973 to 2005 (32 years).

Or so you would have us believe. See, I can play that game too.

During that time, unlike the Computer Thugs, I kept up with the
literature, and the word "hoisting" first appeared textbooks on
compiler design and optimization, including my 1976 text in graduate
school.

Ah, so it has been around for more like 30+ years. I accept the
correction.

Not only compilers do this.  Programmers have been doing it to effect
manual code optimization for quite a long time.  If you wish to
proclaim you were ignorant of this, that's fine.

Computer Thugs (not "programmers") have been creating messes and
billing Yuppie Thugs for cleaning them up by attempting manual code
optimization, for quite a long time.

Not that you would know necessarily, but programmers have been writing
code longer than their have been optimizing compilers, or compilers at
all. More recently, most, if not all compilers have had multiple
optimization bugs at one time or another, and real programmers are
expected to work around these issues, not blame their failures on the
compiler(s).

What "big word" would that be?  

Hoist.

So five letter words are too big for you.

Words, my dear Randy, are nodes in a relational graph and never
standalone. As I've pointed out to the thugs, "verbosity" isn't
"measured" by word count: it is a relation x/y where x is word count
and y is idea count.

By any metric you choose, you are a verbose writer. I'm not sure
anyone other than you on this planet would argue with that.

That said, it's not at all clear how you get from a 5-letter word being
a "big word" to this digression on verbosity. Again, you need a better
dictionary.

I don't care, for this reason, how many letters
are in hoist: I do care that you, as a Thug, misuse it while
criticising people for density of ideas.

If the word had been misused, I am quite sure that someone other than
just you would have complained and said "hey, you're not using the
massive 5-letter world properly, you should have used [foo] instead."
Well, that didn't happen. Nobody involved other than you seemed even
remotely surprised by its usage. That is perhaps because you were the
only participant that was not familiar with it.

For the benefit of the audience, Randy thinks that

for (i = 0; i < length*adjustLength; i++)

where length and adjustLength are "loop invariants" not modified in
the text of the loop (does not occur, nor passed by reference in a
procedure in the loop) must, as a matter of life and death, be
replaced by

int foo = length*adjustLength;
for (i=0; i < foo; i++);


No, that is not what I thought, or said that I thought. You have
deliberately changed this from the original, to trying and soften your
error up. The *real* issue is in the archives, so others can see for
themselves the subterfuge attempted here.

Or perhaps it wasn't a deliberate change, and you are just still
confused by the original issue and don't even realize the difference
between the above code and what you tried to defend before.

K&R have never been my holy book:

Feel free to substitute any competent book on C syntax or more general
programming using C as the underlying language.  I've yet to encounter
any respected title that doesn't explain, usually very early on for
those with short attention spans, the use of for loops.

Computer Thugs hate the basics, mostly because they never mastered the
basics.

By that definition, then you most assuredly are a "Computer Thug".

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





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