Re: Dealing with ad hominem attacks in comp.programming

On Feb 19, 2:06 am, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"spinoza1111" <spinoza1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:49c25863-f55d-4236-b586-2d4811a4053c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>Looks like I don't get a vacation from this ***. I will have to reply
to this in real time, because if I do not, Heathfield et al. will
continue to lie to you.

I read everything that Heathfield reads. All I know about you is the

Everything? Hmm...

information that you and others procide here on this ng.

Malcolm, the problem is that this newsgroup is absurdly biased. Almost
all examples are in C, and NO examples use object-oriented modern
languages.

That's a perfectly unexceptional observation. However no one is arguing that
object-orientation is not topical here. It's a controversial methodology,

Why is OO controversial and not C? There is no technical explanation
for this.

some hate it, some swaear by it, and comp.programming is, amongst other
things, a forum for that debate. C programmers do seem to be in a majority
and maybe that isn't a good thing.

Your weak reply is "what do you expect?" I think people have a right
to expect certain things, including the truth and basic honesty and
decency, especially here, where there's financial no reason to lie.
You are significantly at fault for the nasty tone of this newsgroup
because you're too cowardly to criticise.

I don't like falling out with people. However I don't agree with Heathfield
about everything. For instance it was me who pointed out that fgets() is as
dangerous, in its way, as gets(), which is now accepted wisdom, but was
hotly disputed at the time. I am leading the campaign against size_t and the
plethora of integer types in C. Again it will take a while before it is
realised that I am right.

It's going to take in my case thousands of years: the record will be
at the base of a mountain in the continent that replaced California,
where Google was, and some future explorer will come upon it. Har.


Malcolm>> I think the problem is that most people are more interested in other
peoplethan they are in programming. There's nothing to be ashamed about
 >> in

That interest sounds benign in this phrasing, but please note: the
interest is almost exclusively in tearing other people down.

Not really. I am trying to explain why the antagonistic threads get so much
bandwidth. Meanwhile a thread I consider to be more useful, on adding units
to programming language variables, seems to have died. But it's
understandable that internal polics get more attention than the actual
programming.

I would hesitate to call it "understandable". Such moderate language
creates normalized deviance.


Apart from sucking up to the self-appointed thought leaders, no-one is
supportive of any one else at any time and no effort is made, in
Hamlet's words, to "as a stranger give them welcome".

Your posts are provocative in both the good and the bad sense of that word..
So you must expect quite fierce opposition. However I give you credit for
staying more or less on-topic after I argued that some posts were not
topical.

Don't pat yourself on the back overmuch. My interest in programming
was renewed it is true by my anger at Beautiful Code, but I won't
forget the social context.



If you just posted some reminisces of teaching programming in China you'd be
accepted. But then you wouldn't be you.

And what it means here is that people who think they are programmers,
but lack general, scientific, and even computer culture outside of
narrow career specialties, aren't interested in a trade that they do
not practise well, and in which it is commonly known that they make
mistakes that are far more global than using strlen in a for, such as
failing to realize the difference between && and || and that their
version of memswap inherits all the bad features of memcpy.

Heathfield is a programmer. No point disputing that. He also has interests
outside, but he doesn't agree with your analysis of the political situation.
In fact he appears to be involved in a non-mainstream British political
movement. However I don't know much about it because it isn't topical on the
newsgroups we post on mutually. You're the only one who thinks that
political views impact the rather narrower techncial world, such that a
born-again Christian is likely to be a C programmer and a Marxist likely to
use an object-oriented language. Maybe you're even right on that, but it's a
belief that seems very far-fetched at first sight.

No, I'm the only Frankfurt School Marxist in the world who likes OO.
This is based more on Husserl.


But what you say, given the absence of collegiality, implies that they
don't come here to make friends. They come here to shore up a damaged
sense of self by finding someone who they think can be caricatured as
the nasty little *** they fear they are.

I'm currently off work, so these newsgroups are my major social outlet.
Whilst Usenet is part of real life, online relationships differ from
physical ones. I am not sure whether it is possible to have a real friend
online. There is an aspect of ganging up on someone perceived as a fool, I'd
agree.

There is also the deliberate manufacture of that perception.


this. Only unusual people would think the reverse is even possible. And
generally, whilst technically-focussed people do find a niche, those who
are
promoted to high position tend to be those with good social skills, not
the
most competent.
With the result, for example, that astronauts die: for the
administrator of NASA, Mike Griffin has those social skills you
mention, and having those, refuses to fix a safety culture at NASA
characterised as broken by the late Richard Feynman and by UC
scientific anthropologist Dianne Vaughan.

I am pointing out what is. I genuinely don't know what ought to be.

How about "fewer dead astronauts?"


As in the case of being a "people person", you make something sound
benign which is malign. What you mean is that "people persons" are
precisely thugs whose "interest" in people is how they can use them
for their own gratification, and destroy them if those people talk
back, as I do.

"People people" often graviate towards jobs in areas such as sales or
advertising, where the attitude to the customer is extremely cynical. They
also tend to get the more senior management positions. However you'll find
it extremely difficult to change this.

There has been such a battle in this and many Internet groups since
the early days, since in all too many cases, because "on the Internet
no one knows you're a dog", people with the social skills of losers
and thugs come here to form small but dominant groups.

I ask you to note one thing, Malcolm. Heathfield doesn't seem to have
a life outside these newsgroups. He's always here. NORMAL people take
vacations, and sabbaticals, and, when sick of *** like this, longer
breaks. Heathfield's conduct is abnormal.

All I know about you of Heathfield is what is posted here, or information
obtainable though links posted here. It could be that Heathfield's image is
a pure illusion, it could be that yours is just a game that some teenager is
playing. However Heathfield claims to be a fairly normal, happily married
family man with his own programming business and interests in music and a
Christian political party. I don't see any reason to disbelieve this. You
claim to have been a more academic programmer with spells at Princeton and
now a teaching position in China. Again, I don't see any reason to dispute
this.

The Internet is too young for us to know what a normal pattern of usage is
like. For instance social networking sites seem to have taken off in a big
way. Personally I am not a member of any of them. Warcraft has also gained a
large number of adherents who use it as a kind of second life. Again, I
personally have never played.
I never post to Usenet from work, because I know that if I did I would never
get any programming done. But that's just my personal usage.

It has become a genuine programming problem because his efforts to
remain in control, to target people who don't agree with him, and now
to appear normal, occupy all our time to the exclusion of programming
outside of arguments about C, an outdated programming language.

The flame wars have become a problem, I agree.

I worked with a person with a genuine clinical condition, John Nash.
Crazy people cannot write and have not published: I have. Crazy people
are unemployable: I was employed constantly in the computer field for
thirty years, and am now working six days a week in a far better
field. When Nash recovered he started to publish again in his field.

I am also bipolar. I couldn't write publishable work in the acute phase of
mania, I don't think, but I have written five books, three on programming
and two on atheism.

With a family history of bipolar, I discovered that I get that way
when I drink. So I don't drink.






Crazy people don't have a sense of humor, but my sense of humor falls
flat with Richard Heathfield who almost never gets a joke he didn't
make himself.
Crazy people's humor is at best a sort of twisted mockery of others,
of the sort that Howard specializes in.
Crazy people make the wildest sort of assumptions based on
insufficient evidence. For example, Howard says he was shocked to
discover no mention of the Nash connection in my bio at Developer Dot
Star and implied a conspiracy theory. What he didn't realize, of
course, that at Princeton I met other Remarkable Men and women who
were far more personable than Nash, and that I'm not someone who had
some brief moment of glory.
Crazy people demonize others. I have been demonized.
But most of all (cf Fromm) crazy people can't love and feel pleasure.
Heathfield and Howard got no pleasure in the Spark Notes test. Instead
of being amused by its flaws, they took those flaws personally and
wasted all our time in telling us, with madmen's lack of humor, about
its flaws.
Unfortunately, despite the work of Fromm and Adorno, the psychiatric
profession refuses to recognize an "authoritarian personality
disorder", despite its commonality, because the psychiatric profession
itself is manufactured by authoritarian personal relations of
dominance and control, as in the case where the competent MS therapist
can't get paid through medical insurance but has to work for an
ignorant MD.

To count as an illness a mental disorder has got to do some sort of
objective damage to the person with it. That's why narcissism (which you've
been accused of, though I think unfairly) is a difficult one, because
narcissists often rise to postions of power and influence. Similarly if
people with an authoritarian disodred thrive in authoritarian regimes, or
sub-cultures like ...

My former wife's therapist thought I had (years ago) a narcissistic
personality disorder, and she was right at the time: I was always
obsessed with my own projects to the exclusion of being able to
properly love my wife and kids. We wound up getting divorced and I
discovered that I was crazy about the kids, and as a result I stayed
in programming to support them far longer than I should have, but went
broke anyway.

Today, I still often think that things I do are more significant than
they turn out to be and as a result in C I get very sloppy. When I
programmed real applications in C, I had to do a lot of work offline
with respect to the application simply to have a test suite for the
extensive libraries I developed as workarounds to its deficiencies and
owing to the nonencapsulation, the excessive globalization, of C,
these libraries were themselves the cause of iatrogenic problems.

But when they worked, they worked better than most of the C code I saw
in the real world, code with all sorts of failures, especially in the
overuse of magic constants and the surprise redefinition of systems
features.

Recently I made a series of figure drawings which seemed to me starkly
beautiful, working from memory. I found that more well-trained artists
took these very seriously but also found problems in them: their
trained eye could detect subtle clues showing that the figures were in
impossible poses. I was given a one man show, and, after the show, a
free lecture by the gallery owner, a trained artist, on the need to
draw the model from life.

The point being live and learn, I guess. Randy Howard is so bone
stupid as to accuse me of some sort of theft of intellectual property
when I learn new things here.

I'd ask when people like Heathfield and Howard feel any pleasure at
all, whether in self-admiration or anything. Shakespeare reminds us
that self-love of a certain sort is a perequisite to love of another:
Falstaff loved Prince Hal because Falstaff was so in love with himself
that Falstaff was able to respond to each and every one of Ned Poins'
nasty little barbs one right after the other, coming up with the
magnificent riposte "the lion will not touch the true prince".


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