Re: Message from spinoza1111

On Feb 7, 9:14 pm, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"spinoza1111" <spinoza1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

[snip everything]

This could have been topical, if you'd stuck to the burden of transition,
the current transition from a manufacturing to an information economy, and
how programmers are in the thick of it.

I'd say the REAL transition is from one to a new scarcity as the
formerly colonized insist on a seat at the table. The air here in Hong
Kong is that of Gary, Indiana, in the 1950s. Post-industrial? You
ain't seen nothing yet.

Coal faces re-opening in Britain.


Instead you chose to fire broadsides at Margaret Thatcher, and discuss
almost everything about British culture and economy except its programming
industry. That's what I mean about your threads continually threatening to
go off-topic.

I make NO apology for a Dickensian wealth of detail, a Rabelaisian
breadth, an Hemingwayesque economy, nor a Fitzgeraldian search for the
*mot juste*. Is Moby *** about whaling? In fact, it is.

The question is whether one can learn about programming in a literary
essay. This question happened to be answered in the affirmative in
1975 in Brook's "The Mythical Man Month".

Programming is NOT special. It is influenced from its outside by
social factors. It's JUST a species of office work and a modern form
of scrivening (cf. Bartlelby the Scrivener).

The topicality you seek is Fukuyamian, where Francis Fukuyama
announced, after a superficial reading of Alexandre Kojeve's swot book
for Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, that history was, if not Fordist
bunk, over, and the upcoming generation need only to content itself
with the solving of technical puzzles.


Of course I can answer on grouse moors and the ecological aspects of their
management - I'm a biologist after all - but that would lose all topicality.

--
Free games and programming goodies.http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bgy1mm

.