A note on computing thugs and coding bums

The key fact about the Schildt campaign (a campaign of criticism
directed at Herbert Schildt, author of The Complete C++ Reference
based on such "mistakes" as telling students that negative numbers are
[mostly] stored twos complement) is that it focused on Herb as a
person not to be trusted.

Several good-faith negative reviews were Amazon-posted in May 2004
about my own book, "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler"; but
these reviews called my book "mediocre" and laid out the readers'
expectations that I would have addressed compilation more to the .Net
environment, etc. Fair enough. Other reviewers liked the book.

However, at this time, I'm not worth mounting a deliberate campaign
with a key syntactical change: the shift from the focus on the product
to the focus on the person, and this is the shift that I objected to
in Herb's case. This isn't being conducted on Amazon because I take
steps when it occurs. It is occuring here in my case as well as that
of Herb.

It's Stalinist, it's Fascist, and a lot of other bad things. Kathy
Sierra says it's sexist, too, but it's not.

But, because it's so very unusual for people on electronic networks to
be even physically capable of expressing other than negative emotions
of hatred and rage, confronted as they are with the reification of
their subordination to abstract economic forces in the "workstation"
itself, I am being assaulted for speaking this truth: that it would be
possible to discuss Herb's errors in a specific book, such as the
omission of virtual base classes, without once using syntax of the
form "don't trust Herb" or "Herb is incompetent".

This is being done, I believe, by Richard Heathfield here as the
editor of an inferior and little-regarded book, C Unleashed, to
promote his sales in an inappropriately commercial misuse of usenet.

By "computing thugs" I mean people who unconscionably develop and
market software which makes decisions that controls lives without
elementary controls: people for example who have vended medical
"coverage" software that allows coverage to be denied easily but makes
authorization opaque, and reinsurance and derivative software without
verification that chains of reinsurance or derivatives do not contain
spirals such that the pricing of a reinsurance contract or derivative
ends up recursively depending on that contract or derivative
itself...with the provision of a simple control on this sort of cycle
being, in some shops, a termination offense.

The former type of software created the situation shown by Mike Moore
in his recent film Sicko. Contrary to perception, this film is NOT
about the numerous and growing numbers of uninsured Americans,
including many programmers grudgingly given "consultant" work despite
their skill and experience. It's about paid-up and insured people who
are denied coverage through software that was coded strictly in the
interests of people interested only in accumulating money by denying
coverage, software that should be developed by government and then
given to the companies for mandatory use, or that should be developed
open source.

By "coding bums" I mean the people who serve these thugs, and who've
had any delight or hedonia beaten out of them, who are filled with
rage, and who ignorantly view one or two posts here and then join a
cybernetic mob against the image of the person they feel they've
become: Leon Trotsky's *wildgewordene Kleinburger", the small
bourgeois run amok.
.

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