Why I've returned

I've returned because the treatment of Herb Schildt's books in this
thread in 2000, the treatment of my contributions in 2003 when I was
writing "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler", and the treatment
of Java author Kathy Sierra by the so-called blogging "community"
makes it clear to me that like many blogs, this ng is used by Fascists
to harass people who with solidarity try to mentor others. The goal of
these Fascists is to preserve their consulting business, based as
those businesses are on the use of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to get
billable time.

In the long and complex thread "Brian Kernighan, Maybe I'm Not Worthy,
Maybe I'm Scum", I am online researching the so-called Beautiful C
code in the first essay Beautiful Code by rewriting that code in C
Sharp, showing how, I hope, to critique an author without Fascism.

That critique was immediately attacked by Richard Heathfield (editor/
author of C Unleashed) and Randy Howard.

I then took an online test in C++, a language I do not use based on a
language which I abandoned in 1992, and by reasoning based on my
knowledge of other languages and the way compilers work, I scored 76%.
Mr. Heathfield, who I now understand does not consider himself a C++
expert, instead a C expert (?), scored 80%. Mr Howard took the test
but has not posted his scores, and both have continued their campaign
of global professional and personal assassination.

Mr. Heathfield does so despite the fact that he volunteered discussion
of his answers that showed that he made a very elementary confusion
between the && and || operators, which are heavily used in C. He also
appealed to a complicated standard, which has to allow the safe
conversion of C++ code as executed by a virtual machine to novel
architectures, to claim that several well-known expressions had no
definable result, which was an error.

Heathfield and Howard also claimed that because the other takers, who
were C++ programmers unlike me, had had somewhat higher scores, they
could judge the test as useless in showing C++ or general programming
awareness. This reasoning is circular, and invalid, and the fact that
they advance it is a judgement on their professionalism and competence
in itself.

I ask Heathfield, as the self-appointed leader and enabler of so much
bullying here, bullying which makes this newsgroup useless as an Open
University style learning tool to people all over the world excluded
from higher education, and which may be intended to make it so, to
apologize for his conduct. I ask Howard to apologize for his conduct.
If they cannot do so, I ask them to leave.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Why Ive returned
    ... writing "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler", ... author of C Unleashed) and Randy Howard. ... I wasn't aware Richard Heathfield was the author of that book. ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Posting Moratorium
    ... Richard Heathfield and Randy Howard have been offended since 2000 by ... my knowledge in excess of programming; clearly they labor 24/7 to keep ... such group efforts to get at the truth are consistently ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: Why Ive returned
    ... writing "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler", and the treatment ... I posted a programming test. ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: "Sorting" assignment
    ... Heathfield, Howard et al. do on the one hand, and what people like ... McLean, Bacarisse, and Andy do. ... regard a person as a "troll", then it's your responsibility not to ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: c / c++ : is it end of era ?
    ... the language I am FORCED to use trigraphs, ... You need to know about trigraphs. ... Richard Heathfield ...
    (comp.lang.c)