Re: spinoza programming language status report (or, disruptive technology is always late)

On May 15, 11:42 pm, Richard Heathfield <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
spinoza1111said:

<...irrelevant nonsense snipped - searching for relevant nonsense...>

You are doing a public service if and only if people cannot be the
judge of the material presented by the potential cad-bounder-fraud for
themselves, and need be told by insiders such as Clive Feather that
the man's a fraud.

Nobody, least of all Clive Feather, has claimed that Schildt is a fraud. To
point out mistakes in a book is not the same thing as to accuse its author
of fraud.

To do so repeatedly is to make that claim.

I refer you to my "Dan Appleman" argument.

Dan Appleman, my dev editor at Apress, is a well-known and prolific
author of computer books who with Gary Cornell founded Apress. He is
unlike me or you well-respected and well-liked by a large number of
people, because he is by nature friendly, honest, open and helpful,
and also has contributed very much to his community as a church member
and family man; there's a "Dan Appleman appreciation society" on
Facebook.

Although he's mentioned in the wikipedia article on Apress, *** there
is no Dan Appleman *** page, nor is there for most hard-working tech
authors.

This is as it should be. To add random unknowns whose only "claim to
fame" is that they work hard and get their names on books with narrow
appeal is innately POV unless Wikipedia becomes A Fanfare for the
Common Man, with an entry for practically *** everybody ***.

In other words, the usual narrowness and atomicity of thought which
many wikipedia contributors confuse with scholarship, having learned
to do so at universities that teach an ersatz for education, causes
them to miss the fact that the most neutral article about Joe Bo
Bolonsky, well-known guy in the neighborhood, makes the whole untrue:
makes wikipedia POV.

This is what has happened in the case of Schildt. Some clown like
Clive Feather deliberately and with legally significant malicious
intent wrote the article about Schildt *** merely *** to nail the guy
and in so doing made wikipedia POV: set a precedent: if ya don't like
a guy, perhaps because he took your chick, ya write up a wikipedia
biography, and then use a sockpuppet to add damaging information about
your enemy.

And this is assisted by a learned narrowness of thinking, and we all
sing Hosannahs while the sinners are cast into the flames.

Schildt is sacrificed to a division: "The division of the world into
important and unimportant matters, which has always served to
neutralize the key phenomena of social injustice as mere exceptions,
should be followed up to the point where it is convicted of its own
untruth. The division which makes everything objects must itself
become an object of thought, instead of guiding it."

Adorno has your number, guys: "Technology is making gestures precise
and brutal, and with them men."

Hey! Let's work on wikipedia!: "Everybody must have projects all the
time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life
must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet
directly devoted to pecuniary gain."

"The quantification of technical progress, however, their dissection
into minute operations largely independent of education and
experience, makes the expertise of these new-style managers to a large
degree illusory, a pretence concealing the privilege of being
appointed. That technical development has reached a state which makes
every function really open to all - this immanently socialist element
in progress has been travestied under late industrialism. Membership
of the elite seems attainable to everyone. One only waits to be co-
opted. Suitability consists in affinity, from the libidinal garnishing
of all goings-on, by way of the healthy technocratic outlook, to
hearty realpolitik. Such men are expert only at control"

Damn, Adorno had your number. For wikipedia is dominated by ignorant
men...experts only at control.


Therefore, if you occupy yourself with the failings of a single man,

That's a big if. On Usenet, I discuss computer programming in general and C
programming in particular. In the course of such discussions, I observe
and discuss a great deal of erroneous material. Although Schildt's C books
fail to demonstrate that he knows the language sufficiently well to write
good books about it, there are a great many C programmers who know even
less about C than he does.

This is an illusion, deconstructed easily enough. Most large programs
contain "social bugs". These are mistakes in the code that have been
in releases and on which the users rely. For example, I found a
situation at Princeton where a program referred to uninitialised
memory and had done so for years, but when I fixed the bug, other
parts of the program failed to handle long-in-use data sets. At Bell-
Northern Research, the compiler for the SL/1 programming language had
been changed in Ottawa in violation of the syntax, and when this was
fixed, again, long-used SL/1 code wouldn't compile, so of course, I
removed the fix.

Every real programmer has this experience. The users are using a bug,
and their use alone (sometimes in violation of accounting standards
and even the law) makes it a feature.

This means that your blather about a C independent of use is nonsense.
The fact is that computers are used as part of media to create the
illusion of justice and control: to Manufacture Consent, in Chomsky's
words. Schildt and his editors found that his examples worked on
Microsoft platforms, and most of the customers need to use C on
Microsoft, so they seem to have tested only on Microsoft *to save
time*.

This was good practice. To my knowledge, Feather didn't write a C
program that would exericise every claim he made in the standard
because he and his buddies use exactly the same form of argument,
about *saving time*, shuttling in fact at will and conveniently
between C as praxis and as theory.

Sure, once society supports programming standards as harsh as those
found in medicine, then Schildt's praxis will be deficient. But guess
what. Medicine saves lives, whereas most programs merely make the rich
richer. Furthermore, many business managers rely on the unreliability
of code to create illusions; a friend at Montgomery Ward found that a
program, canceling requests for insurance policies, wasn't removing
the commission records for the salespeople who'd sold the policies.
When he "fixed the bug", he got into a lot of trouble because the
commissions on canceled policies were a big part of many of the
salespeople's incomes: they were Glengarry Glen Ross types, good at
high pressure salesmanship, and many of their customers, given a grace
period by law, had backed out.

It's what I call the "market failure of the vending machine".

On the way home from work last night, I wanted a soda, and there was a
new, powered-on, soda machine in the semi-jungle where I live, placed
in front of a private home. I deposited 8 dollars (HK), and the five
dollar coin was rejected. I tried the machine with every one of the
five dollar coins I had, and all were rejected, but the three dollars
was not returned.

In other words, why work for a living? Buy a soda machine, put it in
your front yard, and get some hacker to wire the reject software so
that it always rejects part of the deposit while keeping the rest.
Betya could do that in Houston.

A significant amount of real programming, I claim, constitutes an
attempt to violate law of contract by in effect giving the customer or
employee no real choice. Therefore, it's obscene to assault Schildt
for errors when in fact all programmers make errors and errors are
their stock in trade.


<snip>

The vilest man tries to gain notoriety by horse-leeching and secretary-
birding of this nature. Clive Feather is such a horse leech and
secretary bird, jealous of fame and a thief of reputation.

Wrong. Clive Feather is an expert on the C language.

<150 lines of junk snipped unread - life's too short. But wait - how do I
know it's junk if I haven't read it? (Answering this question is left as a
simple exercise for the reader.)>

--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999

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