Re: A note on computing thugs and coding bums

On Jan 9, 10:56 pm, Rui Maciel <rui.mac...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
user923005 wrote:
Richard, you're being trolled.  I think it is pretty obvious.  I don't
think he believes one word of what he is saying.  He's just pushing
hot buttons to see if he can get responses.

I also believe that the spinoza character is simply trolling but I wouldn't
say that he is going after Richard Heathfield alone. That spinoza character
makes a point at attacking not only Richard Heathfield but also, by
constantly labelling everyone as being mindlesss followers, all newsgroup
users. That, along with the incessant flood of off-topic posts filled with
personal attacks, purposedly going against the character's own
self-righteous complaints of being the target of personal attacks, and
purposedly veering away from the newsgroup topic, leads to believe that
this spinoza's character was created simply to troll. And he is succeeding..
Annoyingly.

As usual, you've read one or two posts on the surface and taken things
at face value.

Many people here ARE mindless followers because this is a lower middle
class medium to which too many people come here not to dialog and to
think, but to talk about personalities in the negative register and
steal code they don't understand.

FYI, I entered this month with the post "Brian Kernighan, Maybe I'm
not Worthy, Maybe I'm Scum".

This was a technical post describing my concern, with references, to
code presented as Beautiful which seemed to me Ugly because it didn't
even work for modern strings and had numerous other technical flaws.

I then bench-marked it in a C++ wrapper against a C sharp version
which fixed the flaws to discover that the C sharp version is about
3..5 times as slower...but actually works, which the Kernighan code
doesn't owing to Kernighan's and Pike's unfortunate, and C-psychology,
mindset.

This thread, with its humble title and no implication that I was doing
other than questioning Kernighan's judgement, was then systematically
vandalized by Richard Heathfield and Randy Howard with comments about
me based on previous contacts...in which I'd exceeded, by quite a
large margin, their cultural and programming knowledge based on
broader and deeper experience...experience in C alone which included
assisting John Nash with C.

You got your superficial impressions, which you have foolishly acted
upon, from the tenor of my replies. I did not go gently into that good
night, because after the harassment of Kathy Sierra (a Java author who
was threatened and hounded) and given Heathfield's participation in
the persecution of Schildt, I have come to believe that this newsgroup
has been highjacked by him as his own personal property and for gain,
in violation of usenet ethics.

You may be used to sucking up to people. I'm not.

So I would suggest that everyone should simply stop feeding the troll.
Moreover, I would also suggest that no one should pay any attention to the
spinoza character's claims of being any specific person or having written
any book. There's a serious risk for the reputation of an innocent man
being soiled for no good reason.

I am indeed Edward G. Nilges, the author of "Build Your Own .Net
Language and Compiler", and as a computer author I think that what
happened to Schildt and Sierra was ugly. Therefore I speak out as
such.

It has long been possible to identify problems without calling a
person the problem. However, the out of control lower middle class has
taken over usenet to vent its misery by means of psychological
transference, which is why you can't get decent code here and why
people dare not discuss it openly. They are terrorized, given
surveillance and considerations of employability, of computing thugs
here trashing any thread they create by mocking them based NOT on
critical questions (such as what assertions are true at time t) but on
brutal shibboleths (such as void main) which have nothing to do with
programming as a serious profession for adults and everything to do
with tribal membership, to which people flee once, as we see hear,
reading comprehension, the ability to write, civility and basic
decency have fled.

Next time, do your homework.

Rui Maciel

.