Review of Steve McConnell's AFTER THE GOLD RUSH

> If on a Friday night, after a week of 16 hour days essentially fixing
> Microsoft's bugs, with the boss blaming us for taking too long and no
> time to even ask that hot number out, all we have is The Man Show and
> CNN, the fact that we narrate our lives using dominant discourse makes
> us feel like losers.

No Way! Bzzzt! Can't happen! With Steve McConnell's vision of our
newly professionalized software engineering field, we will have
software processes and our bosses under control and thus we will
be out by 5PM everyday to which we will hop in our sports
car to go pick the designated hot young babe for that day of the week
(we are talking weekdays here!). Our newly acquired software engineer
desirability would of course requiring special time
scheduling software to keep track of all those dates with the women!

> Therefore, if we changed the "I'm a loser" narrative to "it is not just
> that I do not have a community, in which I might get to talk to people
> of the opposite sex without the threat/fear of violence which is used
> to separate us" our narrative is less manly but perhaps more useful.
> That is, guys narrate themselves as horny when in fact they are lonely.

More seriously. If software was not such a stupid isolating brain dead
rat race, the field would be more desirable and thus attract more women.
A more 50-50 split between women and men in software would of
course benefit the social aspects of the field greatly (and
thus further increase the desirability and prestige of the field)

Jay

Al Dunbar

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Dec 1, 2000, 2:06:27 AM12/1/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:906d86$lec$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <t2cuv33...@corp.supernews.com>,
> "Al Dunbar" <Al_D...@HoTMaiL.com> wrote:
> >

> > <snip - because we have seen it enough times already>

> > I find it odd that you say that it is just me. The initial replies of
> Jason
> > Stokes and Patrick Logan seemed to me to be somewhat in agreement
> with my
> > comments. The fact that the thread has devolved into a discussion,
> however
> > valuable, that nonetheless has no bearing on the book also tends to
> support
> > my view.
> >
> That's great Al. But it's just you, and thousands of other developers
> who share your assumptions and your world-view.

It is ludicrous that you think you have any concept of either my assumptions
or my world-view when my ONLY comment has been that what you labeled as a
review is anything but. Perhaps you spend so much time writing that you have
little time to read the responses, such as the one where I said "I may

indeed share your disquiet; I just have difficulty understanding what you
are getting at."

> > <snip - because we have seen it enough times already>

Al Dunbar

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Dec 1, 2000, 2:18:27 AM12/1/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:90745i$8vk$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <3A26C6AB...@jay.jay.org>,
> Jay <j...@jay.jay.org> wrote:
> > That review is way to "philosophical" for its own good.
>
> Aww, man, I wanted to maintain a high class tone.

Style without substance. I sort of thought that would be something you would
be against, but then, perhaps I still misunderstand you.

> >
> > I read the book and its a no brainer that software engineers
> > need to organize. This is obvious for the following reasons:
> >
> > (1) Drive up the requirements for software engineers to depress the
> > number of SEs and increase the status of software engineering,
> > thus driving up wages, prestige and programmers desirability by hot
> > chicks.
>
> Yeah, baby!!
>
> But note your low class phraseology is part of the problem set whereas
> my high class "philosophical" phraseology is part of the solution set.

Odd, I haven't seen this solution implemented anywhere.

> First of all, high class phraseology and a philosophical tone has
> always been a chick magnet.

OK, OK, I think I finally get what's going on here, people. We are being had
by a Turing experiment gone slightly off its rails. An admirable try on the
output side, but somewhat weak on the input.

Eric Fischer

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Dec 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/1/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote:

> Another example is a clone of Microsoft Office, called Wordstar.

WordStar, the classic CP/M word processor of the late 1970s, has
become a clone of Microsoft Office? Is nothing sacred?

(Tangentially related: does anyone know whether the company now
selling CD-ROM drives under the Digital Research name has anything
to do with the Digital Research that was responsible for CP/M?)

eric

Jay Maynard

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Dec 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/1/00

On 1 Dec 2000 18:43:04 GMT, Eric Fischer <e...@pobox.com> wrote:

><spino...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>> Another example is a clone of Microsoft Office, called Wordstar.

>WordStar, the classic CP/M word processor of the late 1970s, has
>become a clone of Microsoft Office? Is nothing sacred?

I'd avoided spinoza9999's multi-hundred-line socialist rants after getting
a few lines into the first few and bouncing off the impenetrable rhetoric a
while back...all with a vague feeling that I was mainly bypassing a traincar
load of male bovine exhaust. Thank you for picking out this little gem and
confirming that.

Free clue: WordStar preceded M$ Word by a decade.

Al Dunbar

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Dec 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/1/00

"Jay Maynard" <jmay...@thebrain.conmicro.cx> wrote in message
news:ACBDCDA1677757BC.63EFF2E3...@lp.airnews.net...

> On 1 Dec 2000 18:43:04 GMT, Eric Fischer <e...@pobox.com> wrote:
> ><spino...@my-deja.com> wrote:

> >> Another example is a clone of Microsoft Office, called Wordstar.

> >WordStar, the classic CP/M word processor of the late 1970s, has
> >become a clone of Microsoft Office? Is nothing sacred?
>
> I'd avoided spinoza9999's multi-hundred-line socialist rants after getting
> a few lines into the first few and bouncing off the impenetrable rhetoric
a
> while back...all with a vague feeling that I was mainly bypassing a
traincar
> load of male bovine exhaust. Thank you for picking out this little gem and
> confirming that.

So, perhaps it's NOT just me! :-)

/Al

Eric Smith

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Dec 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/1/00

Giles Todd <g...@at-dot.org> writes:
> My point was that there must come a stage where discussion stops and
> focussed activity starts.

Amen, brother! Let's form a planning committee to develop a list of
action items.

spino...@my-deja.com

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Dec 1, 2000, 8:49:49 PM12/1/00

In article
<ACBDCDA1677757BC.63EFF2E3...@lp.airnews.net>,

jmay...@conmicro.cx wrote:
> On 1 Dec 2000 18:43:04 GMT, Eric Fischer <e...@pobox.com> wrote:
> ><spino...@my-deja.com> wrote:

> >> Another example is a clone of Microsoft Office, called Wordstar.

> >WordStar, the classic CP/M word processor of the late 1970s, has
> >become a clone of Microsoft Office? Is nothing sacred?
>
> I'd avoided spinoza9999's multi-hundred-line socialist rants after
getting
> a few lines into the first few and bouncing off the impenetrable
rhetoric a
> while back...all with a vague feeling that I was mainly bypassing a
traincar
> load of male bovine exhaust. Thank you for picking out this little
gem and
> confirming that.

Sorry for the typo. The product name is StarOffice. It's likely you
are ignorant of the product.

Furthermore: if the style of the original post was offputting it is
then not intended for you. As I have indicated, hatred of what is
misnamed wordiness can be hatred of language itself, and the desire of
some software engineers to free themselves of the tests of history,
language, morality and common sense.

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 1, 2000, 9:34:18 PM12/1/00

In article <3A272219...@jay.jay.org>,

Jay <j...@jay.jay.org> wrote:>
> More seriously. If software was not such a stupid isolating brain dead
> rat race, the field would be more desirable and thus attract more
women.
> A more 50-50 split between women and men in software would of
> course benefit the social aspects of the field greatly (and
> thus further increase the desirability and prestige of the field)
>
> Jay

In many ways, the presence of women professionals in the field raises
the tone. Steve book has an example: the NASA group he describes is
more equitable than the normal group.

This group uses modern software engineering practises and people
typically leave work at a reasonable hour (Steve makes what I think is
a major error here: he ascribes the reasonableness of the hour to the
practices: it's probably the fact that these are government employees
not as subject to death-march schedules, and NASA, post-Challenger, is
wary of death-march schedules.)

Women tend not to want to work the animalistic work hours that male
software engineers work, and this is a virtue.

However, they introduce strains of their own. Deborah Tannen is a
researcher on gender-differentiated styles of computer use, and she's
shown that the virtue and vice of male technicians is their willingness
to push the envelope and take risk, whereas on the whole the virtue and
vice of women engineers is their willingness to slow down and go by the
book. Women are sometimes just afraid of programmers actually
programming, and in my view they are a major force in downsizing and
deskilling as they discourage their programmers from programming.

Women also remind us of the fact that when the modern fully respected
professions of medicine and law were formed in the USA, the formation
was an occasion of extreme sex discrimination. Part of the reason
doctors organized into the modern medical profession was quite
consciously to eliminate the profession of midwife and the women who
assisted in abortions. Even in the early 1960s, women were rare in law
schools, and had to put up with a great deal of hijinx when they did
attend.

This sort of sex discrimination could be institutionalized if
programming became a profession on Steve's model.

Already, Microsoft testing is primarily informed by adolescent male
competitive values for it's whole theme is "you think you so smart."
Many of its questions constitute what I regard (as an adjunct faculty
member) as educational malpractice. I was saddened and astonished,
even though I'm Microsoft certified, to see a woman coworker fail a
Microsoft test repeatedly although she had an advanced degree from a
European university.

Tests in general are biased towards students of higher social class,
and Microsoft tests are biased towards the sort of guy who likes
solving puzzles rather than real problems. They also overemphasize
using Microsoft solutions that at times are inferior to third-party
solutions and so-called "reinventing the wheel."

The extraordinarily poor design of Microsoft tests led, a few years
ago, to cynical gamesmanship in which "boot camps" (another male
metaphor) taught completely unqualified people the answers by rote, and
there has been considerable dishonesty within corporations that require
Microsoft test-takers to "teach" others...by giving them the questions
and the correct answers.

Steve's book is simply uninformed of the cultural and historical matrix
in which the modern full professions of law, medicine and traditional
engineering took place. Although they were formed in the sexism and
racism of the late 19th century, they matured during a liberal phase of
American history which actually encouraged people to better themselves
by becoming professionals, and which reluctantly but steadily welcomed
women and nonwhites into the ranks of professionals.

Our time is considerably different. To be gracious about entry into an
upper middle class profession, whether one's own entry or another's, is
taken as a sign of weakness, for due to the very collapse of tradition,
we're all fighting for the same diminishing pie.

The very opening of the legal profession, while necessary and just, led
in our society to unprecedented levels of despair among actual lawyers
as they no longer were made to feel as if they were "special". They
instead discovered that becoming an associate in a law firm involved
just another paper chase to make partner (as adjunct faculty yearn for
tenure) and they discovered that their work, similar to much work in
data processing, was so much under the control of mega firms and their
mega mega clients that it had no meaning.

The result is that when people talk about professional issues in many
fields including computing, their talk is less about ideals and more
about who gets what. "I'm a doctor and you're not", "I'm a lawyer and
you're not", and "I'm a software engineer and you're not" are slogans,
the form of which appeared in the 1970s as people realized that
traditional forms of distinction were on the wane, but was not (thanks
to the economy) about to replaced by a paradise of equality.

In Minnesota poet Robert Bly's vision of the "sibling society",
the "grownups", those who are professionals or who seek to
professionalize, unconsciously become children chanting "I'm a software
engineer and you're not", or "ha ha ha, you flunked your Microsoft
exam." In Bly's view they do so precisely because their elder siblings
have abandoned history and culture (as Steve unconsciously does, by
reducing software engineering to technology) and placed themselves, and
everybody else, into an insane struggle for place and position.

This nasty brew is not a good place to start testing programmers for
legal certification. A better solution would be to let the free market
decide who's a software engineer, and for the software engineers to
organize, not professional societies, but trade unions. Instead of
reducing programmers to tears with poorly designed examinations or
structured walkovers, the union hall would teach and mentor
programmers, and help them find jobs. Through solidarity, it would be
a place of healing, as well as a great place to meet hot chicks :-).

spino...@my-deja.com

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Dec 1, 2000, 9:59:06 PM12/1/00

In article <t2ek63e...@corp.supernews.com>,

"Al Dunbar" <Al_D...@HoTMaiL.com> wrote:
>
> <spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
> news:90745i$8vk$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
> > In article <3A26C6AB...@jay.jay.org>,
> > Jay <j...@jay.jay.org> wrote:
> > > That review is way to "philosophical" for its own good.
> >
> > Aww, man, I wanted to maintain a high class tone.
>
> Style without substance. I sort of thought that would be something
you would
> be against, but then, perhaps I still misunderstand you.
>
> > >
> > > I read the book and its a no brainer that software engineers
> > > need to organize. This is obvious for the following reasons:
> > >
> > > (1) Drive up the requirements for software engineers to depress
the
> > > number of SEs and increase the status of software engineering,
> > > thus driving up wages, prestige and programmers desirability by
hot
> > > chicks.
> >
> > Yeah, baby!!
> >
> > But note your low class phraseology is part of the problem set
whereas
> > my high class "philosophical" phraseology is part of the solution
set.
>
> Odd, I haven't seen this solution implemented anywhere.

Norwegian computer consultant Tom Gilb authored some excellent books on
software engineering and humanized input in the 1970s. He's also
written about what he calls the "Scandinavian critical model" of
computer science, which gives a greater level of respect and visibility
to data processing labor.

Gilb's theories about "humanized input" became the ergonomics of the
1990s and indirectly influenced the design of the Macintosh. They seem
to derive from the culture of Scandinavian societies, in which the
keypunch operator of the 1970s was not invisible or a form of lowlife
but a person, a citizen, demanding recognition and respect ON THE
JOB...in the form of data processing systems that (instead of
monitoring her for "productivity") used the computer to supply
reasonable and labor saving defaults, and to error check in a labor
saving rather than hostile way.

Here in the States, even today, many companies use keystrokes per
minute as a measure of "productivity": this measure takes as a given
that the keystrokes are the mininum necessary, and, in the States, this
is considered to be a closed question, answered by management once and
for all.

Gilb's work also made visible (as did the contemporary structured
programming revolution) the need of the programmer for some sense of
comprehension and mastery. When structured programming began it was
invented by programmers to save themselves time and to attain some
needed control over their work lives: but because in our culture the
worker is supposed (when push comes to shove) to abandon this in favor
of income, structured programming was gradually taken over by
management.

But Gilb, in his more modern work, has preserved a moderately pro-
labor, critical stance. In a recent article, he has clearly enough
stated that computing snafus are almost never the fault of incompetent
and/or lazy programmers, but of poor management decisions.

"Critical data processing" has been all over the world a source of
quiet success stories. Now, it is true that the people who take a
humanistic, compassionate, and moderately pro-labor stance in their
work don't read Foucault, and lack my taste for going on and on like I
do. The problem is that they cannot form a coherent intellectual
defense, even in their internal monologues, when their successful,
compassionate work-group is taken over by Sharks Is Us, Inc. They are
thus voiceless (even in their internal monologue) when dragooned into
such marvelous Bad Ideas such as Rigid Limits on Software Design (a
real methodology which admits of NO changes to deadlines) or Peoplesoft.

I am somewhat arrogantly trying to give a name and form to what I have
seen as success in software development and universally it seems to me
that software is most successful when it is critical, human, pro-labor,
compassionate. Of course, I do not mean financial success,
necessarily. I mean instead a holistic success in which NO
stakeholder, including the programmers, pay for the success with
exhaustion, broken marriages, and other tragedies.

>
> > First of all, high class phraseology and a philosophical tone has
> > always been a chick magnet.
>
> OK, OK, I think I finally get what's going on here, people. We are
being had
> by a Turing experiment gone slightly off its rails. An admirable try
on the
> output side, but somewhat weak on the input.
>

Sorry you feel that way. I am not a Turing experiment although I am
almost as weird as Turing was.

> <snip - we have already seen enough of this>
>
>

Jay Maynard

unread,

Dec 1, 2000, 10:38:59 PM12/1/00

On Sat, 02 Dec 2000 01:49:49 GMT, spino...@my-deja.com
<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>Sorry for the typo. The product name is StarOffice. It's likely you
>are ignorant of the product.

Not bloody likely, considering it's one that I use semi-regularly, mostly in
the hope that it'll deal with the garbage that the latest incarnation of the
M$ atrocities put out.

>Furthermore: if the style of the original post was offputting it is
>then not intended for you. As I have indicated, hatred of what is
>misnamed wordiness can be hatred of language itself, and the desire of
>some software engineers to free themselves of the tests of history,
>language, morality and common sense.

I do not dislike wordiness, and I believe that language, properly used, is a
tool of great power and elegance. Your great mistake when writing is in
believing that verbosity can make up for utter lack of content or critical
thinking.

Have a nice life.

*plonk*

Andy Rabagliati

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Dec 1, 2000, 6:09:37 PM12/1/00

According to Eric Fischer <e...@pobox.com>:

> <spino...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>
> > Another example is a clone of Microsoft Office, called Wordstar.
>

> WordStar, the classic CP/M word processor of the late 1970s, has
> become a clone of Microsoft Office? Is nothing sacred?

Who launched WordStar2000, with different keybindings, and
wrote their own death warrant ?

Cheers, Andy! http://www.wizzy.com/andyr/Mel.html

Andy Dingley

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Dec 2, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/2/00

spino...@my-deja.com a écrit :

>It's just you, Al. The review is not meant to be a "consumer guide",
>or ersatz for reading the book.

So why not post it to alt.black-turtle-neck or
alt.sex.masturbation.literary instead ?

>The review is instead critique that airs views about "software
>engineering" that seldom see print.

So why title it as a review ?

If you _want_ to ponce about with lit-crit theory, then don't do it in
here. We've got better things to do.

--
Smert' Spamionam

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 12:06:43 AM12/3/00

In article
<02751A529940BEF6.233D7DE0...@lp.airnews.net>,

I have found that people who are quick with the charge of prolixity use
it as a timesaver when they simply do not care, for a good reason, a
bad reason, or no reason at all, to address the issues that were
raised. You haven't explained the lack of content, and as for critical
thinking, your comment here seems to indicate you did not even read the
post: for I've pointed out the ways in which software engineering is
presented in an anti-critical context, and in which programmers who
object to its deskilling implications are categorised, without
reflection, and Luddites.

For a good example of this, please see the editorial comments on the
Amazon web site concerning Steve's book. In their interest in brevity
(which here, as elsewhere, is not really an aesthetic interest at all,
but instead imposed by external economic pressures) the unnamed writers
of the comment cut to the chase: for they immediately characterize
software engineering, not as a positive scientific advance or
engineering innovation, but as a disciplinary measure, sure to put the
Luddites to flight.

In fine, I am extremely offended by your comment concerning my putative
lack of critical thinking. The charge of verbosity may be thought
justly by some to have merit (note that a committment to truth compels
me to phrase this very thought with prolixity, since I wanted at one
and the same time to be charitable and hold fast to my own conviction
that there are precisely enough words, no more and no less.)

But as I have indicated, I began reflecting on these issues in 1981 and
did not express them because I perceived that "software engineering"
was really a disciplinary measure, and I perceived the hazard of the
thought to my career and the futures of my children, at that date quite
young. I perceive myself as being quite the critical thinker because
I've given voice to such an antinominian view, and therefore I am
offended by what you've said.

What you've said illustrates my point that Foucault's theory of
capillary power is relevant to software engineering, for the charge of
verbosity is in my observation used by subordinate intellectuals to
discipline threats from source even more subordinate. Strikingly, what
attracts it is not only word count and the use of subordinate phrases
but also grammatical accuracy and lack of spelling errors.

We're all in Pharaoh's army, as Steve McConnell unconsciously knows,
overseen not by Egyptians, but by fellow Israelites whose fear of
Pharaoh wields the whip.

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 12:11:00 AM12/3/00

In article <t2gkmh...@corp.supernews.com>,

"Al Dunbar" <Al_D...@HoTMaiL.com> wrote:
>
> "Jay Maynard" <jmay...@thebrain.conmicro.cx> wrote in message
>
news:ACBDCDA1677757BC.63EFF2E3...@lp.airnews.net..
.

> > On 1 Dec 2000 18:43:04 GMT, Eric Fischer <e...@pobox.com> wrote:
> > ><spino...@my-deja.com> wrote:

> > >> Another example is a clone of Microsoft Office, called Wordstar.

> > >WordStar, the classic CP/M word processor of the late 1970s, has
> > >become a clone of Microsoft Office? Is nothing sacred?
> >

> > I'd avoided spinoza9999's multi-hundred-line socialist rants after
getting
> > a few lines into the first few and bouncing off the impenetrable
rhetoric
> a
> > while back...all with a vague feeling that I was mainly bypassing a
> traincar
> > load of male bovine exhaust. Thank you for picking out this little
gem and
> > confirming that.
>

> So, perhaps it's NOT just me! :-)

Note the epistemological crisis Al has undergone, for he confessed to a
vague disquiet. But the crisis is resolved by marginalizing the
messenger and thus old Al is all relieved, for it's basically harder to
question institutional power than to marginalize an individual.

Yes, Al, you can return to the Dilbertized herds who at one and the
same time resent and replicate illegitimate authority.

>
> /Al

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 12:19:25 AM12/3/00

In article <saig2tk6cam7csab2...@4ax.com>,

Andy Dingley <din...@codesmiths.com> wrote:
> spino...@my-deja.com a écrit :
>
> >It's just you, Al. The review is not meant to be a "consumer guide",
> >or ersatz for reading the book.
>
> So why not post it to alt.black-turtle-neck or
> alt.sex.masturbation.literary instead ?

Because it happens to be a serious professional concern.

The State of Virginia bought into the rhetoric about software
engineering, especially its brutal implementation of the law of
comparative advantage, and for this reason contracted with Peoplesoft
to implement a human resources system. Peoplesoft's approach was based
on the unproven idea that software written for private business would
work for a unionized public agency, but this was accepted because it
was felt that an in-house system would be "reinventing the wheel."

This neglected the fact that the structure of the system's stakeholders
was completely different from the customers and the employees of a
private business, and the result was that Peoplesoft consultants
(charging almost 200.00 per hour) and in house programmers wasted FIVE
YEARS and got nowhere.

The critical and most needed parts of the system were then rewritten,
in house, by a new team using the Web.

The only sensible explanation of this mess lies in literary critical
theories of reification...in which we make a thing of a word. Computer
programs are not things, therefore it was folly of the State of
Virginia to think that an off the shelf system would work.

>
> >The review is instead critique that airs views about "software
> >engineering" that seldom see print.
>
> So why title it as a review ?
>
> If you _want_ to ponce about with lit-crit theory, then don't do it in
> here. We've got better things to do.
>

Gee, that sounds like good old fashioned censorship to me.
> --
> Smert' Spamionam

naisbodo

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 1:28:46 AM12/3/00

In comp.programming spino...@my-deja.com wrote:

> Yes, Al, you can return to the Dilbertized herds who at one and the
> same time resent and replicate illegitimate authority.

You're obviously heavily into discursive study. There's a lot of work
done with respect to discursive ideals and philosophy which is heavily
jargon-laden, because that jargon is the best way to communicate those
ideas being discussed within that field.

However, when you venture outside of that largely academic field into
the real world, so to speak, you have to be prepared to deal with people
on *their* level. That is, you have to translate your jargon into lay
terms. If you fail to do so, it's entirely your own fault when you
receive negative responses, if only because it's an eminently possible
and reasonable requirement.

> Note the epistemological crisis Al has undergone, for he confessed to a
> vague disquiet. But the crisis is resolved by marginalizing the
> messenger and thus old Al is all relieved, for it's basically harder to
> question institutional power than to marginalize an individual.

This is of course an egregious aggrandizement bolstered by relentless
grandiloquence with little substantive justification, and one easily
applied back to its framer. Your indictment of his marginalization
performatively contradicts itself through self-description; perhaps
if your final clause, ostensibly justifying your ad hominem, were less
nonsequitous it would not so obviously betray its rhetorical nature.

If you are not a troll, you will quickly realize the effect of overly
formal diction in an informal context. Please, desist in your abuse
of formality, and adapt to the groups within which you post. Failure
to do so is simply rude.

Greg Menke

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/3/00

>
> Because it happens to be a serious professional concern.
>
> The State of Virginia bought into the rhetoric about software
> engineering, especially its brutal implementation of the law of
> comparative advantage, and for this reason contracted with Peoplesoft
> to implement a human resources system. Peoplesoft's approach was based
> on the unproven idea that software written for private business would
> work for a unionized public agency, but this was accepted because it
> was felt that an in-house system would be "reinventing the wheel."
>
> This neglected the fact that the structure of the system's stakeholders
> was completely different from the customers and the employees of a
> private business, and the result was that Peoplesoft consultants
> (charging almost 200.00 per hour) and in house programmers wasted FIVE
> YEARS and got nowhere.
>
> The critical and most needed parts of the system were then rewritten,
> in house, by a new team using the Web.
>
> The only sensible explanation of this mess lies in literary critical
> theories of reification...in which we make a thing of a word. Computer
> programs are not things, therefore it was folly of the State of
> Virginia to think that an off the shelf system would work.
> >

The Dept. of Energy has had a similar experience with PeopleSoft. "6
months" was the first quote- at the end of which, the system couldn't
generate the first of the important reports. Its been about 3 years
now, so I imagine its probably gotten somewhat better, but I'd be very
surprised indeed if the new system is actually operating. So thats 3
years of paying a bunch of $200/hr people to learn requirements and
implement them- and thats before you add the incidental support costs
of trying to get Windows to work reliably. "COTS" indeed.

A complete rewrite of the system by the mainframe systems people who
had been maintaining it would almost certainly be substantially
cheaper, not to mention easier.

Gregm

donald tees

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/3/00

spino...@my-deja.com wrote in message <90ckd1$c49$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>In article

>
>What you've said illustrates my point that Foucault's theory of
>capillary power is relevant to software engineering, for the charge of
>verbosity is in my observation used by subordinate intellectuals to
>discipline threats from source even more subordinate. Strikingly, what
>attracts it is not only word count and the use of subordinate phrases
>but also grammatical accuracy and lack of spelling errors.
>
>We're all in Pharaoh's army, as Steve McConnell unconsciously knows,
>overseen not by Egyptians, but by fellow Israelites whose fear of
>Pharaoh wields the whip.

I was amused by these paragraphs. The writing is so verbose, it is
difficult to tell if it is really a post against pomposity, sarcasm, or just
amusing.

I've written software for thirty years now. I've read a book a day, on
the average, since I was about ten. That was in 1956. I think that when
I have to make notes about a 500 word post, then sit down and analyse
it for ten minutes before I can figure out what the poster means,
that there is something wrong with the writing.

Strangely enough, I think I agree, slightly, with what you are trying
to say. I think that perhaps, over five or six arguments, I have come
to a slight understanding as to what you are attempting to express.

However, esoterical expression does not make a theory correct. It is
merely an academic device to boost ego. A good programmer can
express it so even a computer (and maybe a few dumb programmers)
can understand it. That takes a certain skill.

As to the amusement. I think "software engineering" an academic
pomposity foisted upon us in direct response to the pomposity evident
in articles such as yours. They are one and the same thing, just aimed
in the opposite direction.

Al Dunbar

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/3/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:90ckl2$cdv$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <t2gkmh...@corp.supernews.com>,
> "Al Dunbar" <Al_D...@HoTMaiL.com> wrote:
> >
> > "Jay Maynard" <jmay...@thebrain.conmicro.cx> wrote in message
> >
> news:ACBDCDA1677757BC.63EFF2E3...@lp.airnews.net..
> .
> > > On 1 Dec 2000 18:43:04 GMT, Eric Fischer <e...@pobox.com> wrote:
> > > ><spino...@my-deja.com> wrote:

<<snip>>

> > > I'd avoided spinoza9999's multi-hundred-line socialist rants after
> getting
> > > a few lines into the first few and bouncing off the impenetrable
> rhetoric
> > a
> > > while back...all with a vague feeling that I was mainly bypassing a
> > traincar
> > > load of male bovine exhaust. Thank you for picking out this little
> gem and
> > > confirming that.
> >
> > So, perhaps it's NOT just me! :-)
>
> Note the epistemological crisis Al has undergone, for he confessed to a
> vague disquiet. But the crisis is resolved by marginalizing the
> messenger and thus old Al is all relieved, for it's basically harder to
> question institutional power than to marginalize an individual.

My reference to a vague disquiet was no more a "confession" than was yours.
In actual fact, it was an attempt to extend a symbolic hand of
non-disagreement with you on certain points. The fact that these points of
possible agreement have very little to do with the subject line (book
review), has already been discussed in this thread.

> Yes, Al, you can return to the Dilbertized herds who at one and the
> same time resent and replicate illegitimate authority.

First, I think that the majority of other posts have generally confirmed
that it is not just me.

Second, for all of your attempts to sound more philosophical than the rest
of us, your excess verbiage tends to hide the fallacy of your own
conclusions. One of these being that those who disagree with your viewpoints
must all belong to the moral low-road simply because yours is the high road,
or at least you imply that it is.

Another is the fallacy that "if you disagree with me on this one point, then
it must be that you disagree with me on all points".

Another is your contention that my apparent decision to "marginalize" you is
my way of resolving my apparent "epistemological crisis" by taking the easy
way out because it is easier to do so than to question institutional power.
An alternate view, that would be much easier for you to consider were you
the sort of person who could at least theorize the possibility that you are
not always right on all points, could be that my expressed views happen to
represent what I think. The easy way is not always wrong, and the hard way
is not always correct. If they were, then, by definition, it would always be
easy to determine what is correct -- you would just always take the
difficult choice.

Another is that you, more than me, are the one using marginalization
techniques in order to avoid having to consider and address the arguments of
the other side.

/Al

Al Dunbar

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/3/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:909ohp$coc$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <t2ek63e...@corp.supernews.com>,
> "Al Dunbar" <Al_D...@HoTMaiL.com> wrote:
> >
> > <spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
> > news:90745i$8vk$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
> > > In article <3A26C6AB...@jay.jay.org>,
> > > Jay <j...@jay.jay.org> wrote:

<<<snip>>>

> > > But note your low class phraseology is part of the problem set
> whereas
> > > my high class "philosophical" phraseology is part of the solution
> set.
> >
> > Odd, I haven't seen this solution implemented anywhere.
>
> Norwegian computer consultant Tom Gilb authored some excellent books on
> software engineering and humanized input in the 1970s. He's also
> written about what he calls the "Scandinavian critical model" of
> computer science, which gives a greater level of respect and visibility
> to data processing labor.

In deference to Mr. Gilb, whose works I have not read, I would assume that
his "high class phraseology" was combined with actual content, rather than
simply being there for its own sake.

<<snip - not because I disagree, just because there is too much text here>>

> I am somewhat arrogantly trying to give a name and form to what I have

"somewhat"? :-)

> seen as success in software development and universally it seems to me
> that software is most successful when it is critical, human, pro-labor,
> compassionate. Of course, I do not mean financial success,
> necessarily. I mean instead a holistic success in which NO
> stakeholder, including the programmers, pay for the success with
> exhaustion, broken marriages, and other tragedies.

Sorry, but, on this point at least, I will have to AGREE with you. I would
bet, however, that many of those people whose lives you want to protect from
abuse perpetrated on them by the establishment would get not much more than
a good laugh out of your verbose rants on their behalf. You would likely say
that that is because they are not your philosophical equal. To that I say I
am glad.

> >
> > > First of all, high class phraseology and a philosophical tone has
> > > always been a chick magnet.
> >
> > OK, OK, I think I finally get what's going on here, people. We are
> being had
> > by a Turing experiment gone slightly off its rails. An admirable try
> on the
> > output side, but somewhat weak on the input.
> >
> Sorry you feel that way.

Actually, I do not feel that way. I have often suspected your inability to
understand what others say; it appears that sarcasm is just one more thing
you have difficulty discerning. :-)

> I am not a Turing experiment although I am
> almost as weird as Turing was.

This fact has been made abundantly clear.

/Al

spino...@my-deja.com

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Dec 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/3/00

In article <90dl73$pc0$1...@news.igs.net>,
"donald tees" <don...@willmack.com> wrote:
> spino...@my-deja.com wrote in message <90ckd1$c49
$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
> >In article

>
> >
> >What you've said illustrates my point that Foucault's theory of
> >capillary power is relevant to software engineering, for the charge
of
> >verbosity is in my observation used by subordinate intellectuals to
> >discipline threats from source even more subordinate. Strikingly,
what
> >attracts it is not only word count and the use of subordinate phrases
> >but also grammatical accuracy and lack of spelling errors.
> >
> >We're all in Pharaoh's army, as Steve McConnell unconsciously knows,
> >overseen not by Egyptians, but by fellow Israelites whose fear of
> >Pharaoh wields the whip.
>

> I was amused by these paragraphs. The writing is so verbose, it is
> difficult to tell if it is really a post against pomposity, sarcasm,
or just
> amusing.

I should mention at this point that I am a published author, have been
for about twenty years, and finally that I am under contract to write a
book on software.

Now, this in itself does not indicate that I am not verbose. The only
accurate definition of verbosity lies not in raw word count but in the
RATIO of words to needed and/or original ideas.

The problem is that this ratio is not surd, for there is no such thing
as counting when it comes to ideas. What we count is always the token:
the expression in words of the idea. This is illustrated by the fact
that we find that ideas are sometimes equivalent.

The charge of prolixity is all too often technically Fascist since it
purposely mistakes, for verbosity, a density of new, surprising, anti-
nominian and otherwise disquieting ideas.

There are overly verbose writers. I used to work for an ex-IBMer who
wrote a series of books on the IBM System/3, a forerunner of the
AS/400, Jerome Murray. I found his books absurdly pompous and verbose,
and initially I found Jerry pompous and verbose in person.

However, he was the first adult male to notice that I knew how to
program in assembly language and he encouraged me to pursue a
programming career. I happen to value the ornate and verbose way in
which he expressed these thoughts as opposed to the deafening and cruel
silence with which most adult males in business treat kids.

Also, years later I found that he had joined a conservative Catholic
organization (Opus Dei.) While Opus Dei is on the opposite end of the
political spectrum from yours truly, this made it clear to me that part
of the reason for Jerry's verbosity was identical to part of the reason
for my own verbosity.

It was cultural. Both Jerry and I had been educated by Catholic
priests who gave higher grades to longer papers IF there were no errors
in grammar and spelling. Educated Roman Catholics share with educated
Arabs, and other cultures supposed more primitive than American free-
market Protestantism, a love of language whereas in the dominant
culture time and language are forms of money...with which one is
supposed to be somewhat anal-compulsive.

I thus have an identity politics claim that I am being discriminated
against because of cultural prejudice, but I'd prefer to get beyond
this wearisome discussion of verbosity. I feel that many posters in
this thread are using the charge because they do indeed share my
disquiet at the brutalization and reification of software developers,
but are afraid for their own position in society.

>
> I've written software for thirty years now. I've read a book a day,
on
> the average, since I was about ten. That was in 1956. I think that
when
> I have to make notes about a 500 word post, then sit down and analyse
> it for ten minutes before I can figure out what the poster means,
> that there is something wrong with the writing.

That may well be, for all have sinned.

>
> Strangely enough, I think I agree, slightly, with what you are trying
> to say. I think that perhaps, over five or six arguments, I have come
> to a slight understanding as to what you are attempting to express.

Cool.

>
> However, esoterical expression does not make a theory correct. It is

No. But there must be an explanation of Gresham's law ("99 percent of
everything is crap.") Perhaps thought of truly high quality is like
Olympic sport with its own severe demands. When I ran the London
Marathon, I had to live, sleep and breathe the London Marathon, and I
had to become an esoteric adept at marathon running. Why should
software be any different?

> merely an academic device to boost ego. A good programmer can
> express it so even a computer (and maybe a few dumb programmers)
> can understand it. That takes a certain skill.
>
> As to the amusement. I think "software engineering" an academic
> pomposity foisted upon us in direct response to the pomposity evident
> in articles such as yours. They are one and the same thing, just
aimed
> in the opposite direction.

You don't recall the attacks made on academic computer science by Steve
McConnell.

There is a sharp distinction between the sort of academic careerism and
pomposity found in traditional humanities departments, and the parallel
phenomenon found in business schools.

In both venues, the faculty enjoy protection from the marketplace. In
public and first-tier private schools, the protection for English and
computer science faculty is provided by the taxpayers or the endowment.

The business school professors like to think of themselves as more
attached to the free market but they, too, are isolated from the REAL
free market by a combination of public respect for education (any
education) and a vast and growing network of pro-business funds and
think-tanks, as well as the unquestioned (and nearly criminal)
diversion of public funds into support for "free" market ventures.

McConnell's "software engineering" is more a business school
phenomenon. Now apart from the technicalities of public accounting,
business schools add or transmit precious little to or from the stock
of human knowledge. Their main function is to manufacture consent to
the proposition that the business of America is business, which
involves, in software engineering, avoiding "disruption" as we build
the modern Pyramids.

You are perfectly correct in saying that parts of software engineering
are academic pomposities, and in believing that many English lit-crit
types are frauds. However, they are pompous frauds in their own way,
and probably because of Gresham's law.

But just as we find the occasional gem (such as the work of Richard
Rorty or Martha Nussbaum) in the general muck of humanities culture, we
ALSO find good ideas in B school work. If few add to or transmit from
human knowledge *per se*, their value nonetheless resides in the way
they enhance people's lives, by, for example, showing them how to
program in Visual Basic, and thereby earn a living without selling
drugs. Some of the work done at the private, for-profit University of
Phoenix is first rate, for example. If the B schools got back to their
original idea, which was preparing working slobs for a better life, and
out of neoconservative horseshit, they'd find their soul.

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/3/00

In article <90cp6u$p5v$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>,

naisbodo <nais...@enteract.com> wrote:
> In comp.programming spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> > Yes, Al, you can return to the Dilbertized herds who at one and the
> > same time resent and replicate illegitimate authority.
>
> You're obviously heavily into discursive study. There's a lot of work
> done with respect to discursive ideals and philosophy which is heavily
> jargon-laden, because that jargon is the best way to communicate those
> ideas being discussed within that field.
>
> However, when you venture outside of that largely academic field into
> the real world, so to speak, you have to be prepared to deal with
people
> on *their* level. That is, you have to translate your jargon into lay
> terms. If you fail to do so, it's entirely your own fault when you
> receive negative responses, if only because it's an eminently possible
> and reasonable requirement.

Thanks for this thoughtful comment.

Last year I gave a rather verbose talk "Was Theodore Adorno a Schnook
or a Good Guy?" at Chicago's famous "hobo college", The College of
Complexes.

A left-wing high school teacher took me to task in your thoughtful way.

However, the demand, thought to be egalitarian, reasonable and fair,
that one speak the speech of Da People as a prior requirement that gets
to "trump" or supersede the nondistortion of the message, is part of
the overall culture of dominance. Read Adorno himself for the
(ultimately) common-sense observation that oppression squeezes the
ability to think complex thoughts out of the victim class.

Besides, George Dubya should make it clear that their is nothing
egalitarian about oversimplified speech. He and his goddamn father
both used oversimplified biz-speech in order to cover up their
monkeyshines, and his goddamn father learned this skill in the Central
Intelligence Agency. Just as we funded military dictators in the 1970s
who spoke simply and brutally to their people "get to work and shut the
fuck up", this particular chicken is coming home to roost.

>
> > Note the epistemological crisis Al has undergone, for he confessed
to a
> > vague disquiet. But the crisis is resolved by marginalizing the
> > messenger and thus old Al is all relieved, for it's basically
harder to
> > question institutional power than to marginalize an individual.
>
> This is of course an egregious aggrandizement bolstered by relentless
> grandiloquence with little substantive justification, and one easily
> applied back to its framer. Your indictment of his marginalization
> performatively contradicts itself through self-description; perhaps
> if your final clause, ostensibly justifying your ad hominem, were
less
> nonsequitous it would not so obviously betray its rhetorical nature.
>

The difference between you obvious satire is that I have a real social
and political goal, and where my syntax is complex it is actually
trying to be fair. Your nasty purpose is the opposite, and it is to
make fun of me. I have no personal problem with this for believe it or
not I do not take myself all that seriously. My concern is that this
pre-emptive debate about prolixity forestalls any real discussion of
the ways in which software developers are being materially screwed.

> If you are not a troll, you will quickly realize the effect of overly
> formal diction in an informal context. Please, desist in your abuse
> of formality, and adapt to the groups within which you post. Failure
> to do so is simply rude.
>

No, I will NOT adapt to the group in which I post. That is because the
Internet statistically over-represents the worst elements in our
society, weighted as it is towards physical cowards, truly pompous neo-
conservatives, Ku Kluxers, and people like Scientologists and Holocaust
deniers who use the lack of friction implicit in electronic technology
to spread vicious lies at the speed of light.

Certain thoughtful observers of pornography in the 1970s asked, of the
scenes in which the vulnerability of women was exploited by offscreen
men, where's the freedom here? The same question can be asked of the
Internet, where important and serious questions including the
oppression of intellectual labor are policed in comically sadistic
terms by the intellectuals of Pharaoh's army.
> --
> nais...@enteract.com
> http://www.naisbodo.com/

Marco S Hyman

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/3/00

> ALSO find good ideas in B school work. If few add to or transmit from
> human knowledge *per se*, their value nonetheless resides in the way
> they enhance people's lives, by, for example, showing them how to
> program in Visual Basic, and thereby earn a living without selling
> drugs. Some of the work done at the private, for-profit University of

Visual Basic: it keeps pushers off the streets!

// marc

Al Dunbar

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/3/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:90ehr2$m12$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <90dl73$pc0$1...@news.igs.net>,
> "donald tees" <don...@willmack.com> wrote:
> > spino...@my-deja.com wrote in message <90ckd1$c49
> $1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
> > >In article
> >
> > >
> > >What you've said illustrates my point that Foucault's theory of
> > >capillary power is relevant to software engineering, for the charge
> of
> > >verbosity is in my observation used by subordinate intellectuals to
> > >discipline threats from source even more subordinate. Strikingly,
> what
> > >attracts it is not only word count and the use of subordinate phrases
> > >but also grammatical accuracy and lack of spelling errors.
> > >
> > >We're all in Pharaoh's army, as Steve McConnell unconsciously knows,
> > >overseen not by Egyptians, but by fellow Israelites whose fear of
> > >Pharaoh wields the whip.
> >
> > I was amused by these paragraphs. The writing is so verbose, it is
> > difficult to tell if it is really a post against pomposity, sarcasm,
> or just
> > amusing.
>
> I should mention at this point that I am a published author, have been
> for about twenty years, and finally that I am under contract to write a
> book on software.

Please let us know when it is available.

> Now, this in itself does not indicate that I am not verbose. The only
> accurate definition of verbosity lies not in raw word count but in the
> RATIO of words to needed and/or original ideas.

OKOK, so you are not verbose. Now tell us what the word is that means that
you are so interested in contemplating the wonderfulness of your own
somewhat voluminous use of the language, that you are willing to sacrifice
almost any opportunity you might have to make your actual meaning clear by
shrouding it in so much double-speak that even those that might otherwise
agree with some of your points are becoming exasperated.

> The problem is that this ratio is not surd, for there is no such thing
> as counting when it comes to ideas. What we count is always the token:
> the expression in words of the idea. This is illustrated by the fact
> that we find that ideas are sometimes equivalent.
>
> The charge of prolixity is all too often technically Fascist since it
> purposely mistakes, for verbosity, a density of new, surprising, anti-
> nominian and otherwise disquieting ideas.

I dount that it is Fascist in this case; most of us just think you use too
many words. Either that, or you are generally incapable of expressing a
single, simple thought, simply (aside from a few quick ripostes). The fact
that we seem unable to express this to you in terms such that you understand
our meaning (rather than the individual meaning of our words) is not our
inability to communicate, IMO, but simply part of your own.

/Al

Al Dunbar

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/3/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:90eiqt$msj$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <90cp6u$p5v$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>,
> naisbodo <nais...@enteract.com> wrote:
> > In comp.programming spino...@my-deja.com wrote:

> > This is of course an egregious aggrandizement bolstered by relentless
> > grandiloquence with little substantive justification, and one easily
> > applied back to its framer. Your indictment of his marginalization
> > performatively contradicts itself through self-description; perhaps
> > if your final clause, ostensibly justifying your ad hominem, were
> less
> > nonsequitous it would not so obviously betray its rhetorical nature.
> >

> The difference between you obvious satire is that I have a real social
> and political goal, and where my syntax is complex it is actually
> trying to be fair.

Methinks he is weakening, as evidenced by the obvious grammatical error in
the sentence above :-)

Sorry to the previous poster, as your "obvious satire" was off the mark in
that it made more sense than the matter you were satirizing.

> Your nasty purpose is the opposite, and it is to
> make fun of me.

Not so in the least. This is just good healthy disagreement with some of
your ideas and most of your method.

> I have no personal problem with this for believe it or
> not I do not take myself all that seriously. My concern is that this
> pre-emptive debate about prolixity forestalls any real discussion of
> the ways in which software developers are being materially screwed.

In that case, why do you not start a new thread entitled "the ways in which
software developers are being materially screwed". Perhaps I would discover
more about Steve McConnells book by following that thread, as I have
certainly learned nothing here.

> > If you are not a troll, you will quickly realize the effect of overly
> > formal diction in an informal context. Please, desist in your abuse
> > of formality, and adapt to the groups within which you post. Failure
> > to do so is simply rude.
> >

> No, I will NOT adapt to the group in which I post.

Ergo, he *is* a Troll.

> That is because the
> Internet statistically over-represents the worst elements in our
> society, weighted as it is towards physical cowards, truly pompous neo-
> conservatives, Ku Kluxers, and people like Scientologists and Holocaust
> deniers who use the lack of friction implicit in electronic technology
> to spread vicious lies at the speed of light.

Hey, some of us will agree to some of that, however, trying to change the
statistical balance all on your own by the sheer volume of text is certainly
an onerous task, if an ineffective one.

/Al

Ariel Scolnicov

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/3/00

[...]

Eschew sesquipedilianism!

[...]

--
Ariel Scolnicov

naisbodo

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 8:49:37 PM12/3/00

In comp.programming spino...@my-deja.com wrote:

> The charge of prolixity is all too often technically Fascist

[snip]

> Gresham's law.

No, Godwin's law! :-)

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 9:06:30 PM12/3/00

In article <x7d7f93...@hana.snafu.org>,
Marco S Hyman <ma...@snafu.org> wrote:

> spino...@my-deja.com writes:
>
> > ALSO find good ideas in B school work. If few add to or transmit
from
> > human knowledge *per se*, their value nonetheless resides in the way
> > they enhance people's lives, by, for example, showing them how to
> > program in Visual Basic, and thereby earn a living without selling
> > drugs. Some of the work done at the private, for-profit University
of
>

> Visual Basic: it keeps pushers off the streets!

Note the Foucauldian moment we are enjoying here. I learned Visual
Basic, used it for a number of years, and got a part-time job teaching
VB at an inner city college. A number of my students may very well
have been recovering from joblessness and its attendant misuse of drugs
and alcohol, in the microcosm because they learned VB and became
employable, and in the macrocosm because Clinton's administration
funded training opportunity far more than the previous
admininstrations, did, or the Republicans will after their coup d'etat.

The Foucauldian moment asserts power using pleasure. Therefore, your
slogan trivializes the very real lack of opportunity for inner city
people...and also, through oversimplification, characterises all of
them as pushers, whereas in reality the statistical majority conducts
itself at a personal level better than upper middle class white people,
simply because retribution for "lifestyle experimentation" is so brutal
in the inner city.

This is possibly the major reason why I remain "verbose." 1960s
politics of slogans and bumper stickers turned liberation into friendly
fascism.
>
> // marc

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 9:25:13 PM12/3/00

In article <t2lrsvr...@corp.supernews.com>,

"Al Dunbar" <Al_D...@HoTMaiL.com> wrote:>
> > I should mention at this point that I am a published author, have
been
> > for about twenty years, and finally that I am under contract to
write a
> > book on software.
>

> Please let us know when it is available.

It is scheduled for late 2001.

>
> > Now, this in itself does not indicate that I am not verbose. The
only
> > accurate definition of verbosity lies not in raw word count but in
the
> > RATIO of words to needed and/or original ideas.
>

> OKOK, so you are not verbose. Now tell us what the word is that means
that
> you are so interested in contemplating the wonderfulness of your own
> somewhat voluminous use of the language, that you are willing to
sacrifice
> almost any opportunity you might have to make your actual meaning
clear by
> shrouding it in so much double-speak that even those that might
otherwise
> agree with some of your points are becoming exasperated.
>

While I take pleasure in concepts, I am not thrilled with the
wonderfulness of the ideas. They are pessimistic as regards the future.

Look, here are some "simple" ideas: "winning is the only thing"
and "down with intelligence!" You want me to be a modern reductionist
sort of dude who distills the lived complexity of software to a few
simple formula, and I am not gonna. But to sum it up I often quote
Dijkstra. Software is a new form of applied mathematics.

> I dount that it is Fascist in this case; most of us just think you
use too
> many words. Either that, or you are generally incapable of expressing
a
> single, simple thought, simply (aside from a few quick ripostes). The
fact
> that we seem unable to express this to you in terms such that you
understand
> our meaning (rather than the individual meaning of our words) is not
our
> inability to communicate, IMO, but simply part of your own.

Perhaps the problem as you phrase it, Al, has a material basis.
Perhaps so many simple thoughts have been privatized that truly
original thoughts have a genomic or gnomic complexity.

This is really beginning to piss me off, because one of the major
reasons I was as you say verbose was an attempt to be fair to Steve
McConnell, who I briefly met in 1995 and whose book Code Complete is an
excellent piecea work. It's also been an attempt to be fair to other
discussants who may know far more about software engineering than I,
for in many places I've waxed verbose, in saying that the science in
software engineering, to the extent it is science and not power, is
valid.

You may have wanted some strongly worded and simple, manly "flame" of
software engineering like this: "software engineering is a buncha
management jagoffs who are trying to get rid of us Great Programmers
and replace them with underpaid clerks."

The trouble with this simply, manly way of expression is that it
IMMEDIATELY transforms the programmer saying it from his human
complexity into a cartoon character of an unreconstructed, old-
fashioned sort of programmer who resents, sheerly because of his out
dated skill set, anything new. This plays into the software engineer's
hands.

This is a serious fucking matter. Commencing in the 1980s, highly
skilled programmers who were all too willing and able to learn new
technologies were fired less for technical reasons and more for
rhetorical and cultural reasons. At companies like Apple,
management/marketing and programmers adopted almost cartoonishly
opposite rhetorical styles without even thinking: the programmers
dressed and look like lawn trolls: the management and marketing droids
dressed and looked like Brenda Starr.

In American culture, people are subtly encouraged to self-transform
into cartoonlike identities to an extreme extent so that their
personalities fit onto a performance evaluation, but its precisely this
oversimplification of the Self that leads (1) to the layoff of the self-
caricatured lawn troll who insists on using line by line unix, or (2)
the near-ruin of Apple in the early 1990s by out of control Brenda
Starr types.

>
> <snip - "I begin to weary of this motif" - Didi, Waiting for Godot
(or was
> that Gogo?)>
>

Hip weariness is part of the problem for it too manufactures going with
the flow.
> /Al

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 9:42:54 PM12/3/00

In article <t2lsipe...@corp.supernews.com>,> > >

> > The difference between you obvious satire is that I have a real
social
> > and political goal, and where my syntax is complex it is actually
> > trying to be fair.
>
> Methinks he is weakening, as evidenced by the obvious grammatical
error in
> the sentence above :-)

The sentence was inapposite but technically correct. "My syntax...was
trying to be fair" is an inapposite contract of "I was using complex
syntax in order to be fair." Inelegantly, and without warning, my
syntax became an active agent that could be said to try, to be fair.
These are unedited, but proofread, posts and I probably should have
spotted this construction.

> > Your nasty purpose is the opposite, and it is to
> > make fun of me.
>
> Not so in the least. This is just good healthy disagreement with some
of
> your ideas and most of your method.

But you haven't gotten at all to the ideas and you haven't been
constructive and you're being MEAN to me :-(. Cut it out or I will
tell Professor Dijkstra :-).

>
> > I have no personal problem with this for believe it or
> > not I do not take myself all that seriously. My concern is that
this
> > pre-emptive debate about prolixity forestalls any real discussion of
> > the ways in which software developers are being materially screwed.
>
> In that case, why do you not start a new thread entitled "the ways in
which
> software developers are being materially screwed". Perhaps I would
discover
> more about Steve McConnells book by following that thread, as I have
> certainly learned nothing here.
>

I've got a fabulous idea. Why don't you just READ his book, or pay me
to write a summary?

> > >
> > No, I will NOT adapt to the group in which I post.
>
> Ergo, he *is* a Troll.

We are having another Foucauldian moment, for it has long been an
article of faith among libertarian digerati that we gots like total
free speech on de Internet now since anybody can say anything. An
implication frequently drawn is that old time liberals and the
Politically Correct do not have our libertarian committment to free
speech because they would materially restrict "hate" speech.

The Foucauldian moment is to apply an apparently pleasurable
description, not to views, but to persons expressing the view. As so
often happens in American culture, the person is in a lighthearted way
reduced to a cartoon: here a hairy gnome who lives under a bridge and
who has a tendency to harass fair maidens.

The Foucauldian moment is to overlay real social injustice with the
laughter of nervous children: for the ORIGINAL origin of the modern use
of "troll" may date from Santa Cruz, CA, in the 1980s.

In that supposedly liberal town, a movement was started against Santa
Cruz "trolls", aging and homeless 1960s hippies who unlike the members
of this NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) movement had not cashed in on the
real-estate boom. Unreflectingly, these "grassroots" yeomen simply
ignored the need for charity and did not reflect that their horror
of "trolls" crystallized their own anxiety about their own (often
foolish and extremely tenuous) financial affairs.

This nasty usage has become virtualized in the appellation "troll", for
many of the Santa Cruz and valley homeowners were also internet
surfers. I hasten to add this is theory and needs empirical
confirmation: but the modern use of "troll" is in my view a form of
hate speech that shows the real shallowness of any committment, on the
internet, to material freedom of speech.

>
> > That is because the
> > Internet statistically over-represents the worst elements in our
> > society, weighted as it is towards physical cowards, truly pompous
neo-
> > conservatives, Ku Kluxers, and people like Scientologists and
Holocaust
> > deniers who use the lack of friction implicit in electronic
technology
> > to spread vicious lies at the speed of light.
>
> Hey, some of us will agree to some of that, however, trying to change
the
> statistical balance all on your own by the sheer volume of text is
certainly
> an onerous task, if an ineffective one.
>

I type fast.

Gene Wirchenko

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 10:55:48 PM12/3/00

[snip]

>I have found that people who are quick with the charge of prolixity use
>it as a timesaver when they simply do not care, for a good reason, a
>bad reason, or no reason at all, to address the issues that were
>raised. You haven't explained the lack of content, and as for critical

Interesting. I've found that people who retreat behind dense
jargon-laden polysyllablism are often trying to hide that they don't
know what they are talking about. Sometimes, they hide their
ignorance from themselves, but are usually less successful in fooling
others.

You'd do much better to put down that thesaurus and write
plainly. It would mean that many more people would be able to
understand you. That is a good thing assuming that your ideas are
worth anyone reading about. Well, are they?

[snip]

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation:
I have preferences.
You have biases.
He/She has prejudices.

naisbodo

unread,

Dec 3, 2000, 11:07:03 PM12/3/00

[Note to anyone not interested in a verbose rebuttal of Spinoza: stop
reading here, my apologies.]

In comp.programming spino...@my-deja.com wrote:

> Al Dunbar <Al_D...@HoTMaiL.com> wrote:>
>>
>> OKOK, so you are not verbose. Now tell us what the word is that means
>> that you are so interested in contemplating the wonderfulness of your
>> own somewhat voluminous use of the language, that you are willing to
>> sacrifice almost any opportunity you might have to make your actual
>> meaning clear by shrouding it in so much double-speak that even those
>> that might otherwise> agree with some of your points are becoming
>> exasperated.
>
> While I take pleasure in concepts, I am not thrilled with the
> wonderfulness of the ideas. They are pessimistic as regards the future.

This bit of verbiage lacks context. "The" ideas? Which ideas do you
mean? "Concepts"? Which concepts do you mean? This didn't answer his
post at all! Luckily, you went on to give some more relevant text:

> Look, here are some "simple" ideas: "winning is the only thing"
> and "down with intelligence!" You want me to be a modern reductionist
> sort of dude who distills the lived complexity of software to a few
> simple formula, and I am not gonna.

Yikes! You're indulging in two fallacies to make your point. Allow
me to enumerate my arguments for clarity:

First, you unnecessarily create a link between complexity of expression
and complexity of thought. Complex thoughts can be expressed in simple
ways, and simple thoughts can be expressed in complex ways. In order
to express complex ideas simply, however, one must have a clear grasp
of them.

So why does the realm of academia insist on using "big words" if they
can do without? Obviously, because expression is made more concise
using these words. This is desirable because it reduces the level
of redundancy in communication, which is high in a specific field if
one is reduced to simple speech. Having a handy label for an idea
lets you express it without taking the time to explain it. (See my
third point for the disadvantage to this.)

Now, once you move outside this realm in which everyone understands
the more concise expression of these ideas, simply because they may
not be familiar with them or may not know the academic labels, it no
longer reduces redundancy in communication, because the ideas are not
commonly expressed. Therefore it behooves the speaker to reduce his
*expression* to simple forms, even if they are more verbose, when in
a context where the labels and more concise expressions are unlikely
to be understood.

That is to say, you're unnecessarily claiming that you cannot express
your ideas more simply without reducing the complexity of the ideas
themselves. Complexity of expression and complexity of thought are
two separate measures, and your failure to distinguish them is what
I have labeled your first fallacy.

Second, you're using the rhetorical tactic of reducto ad absurdum in
your examples:

> Look, here are some "simple" ideas: "winning is the only thing"
> and "down with intelligence!"

Even if the above complexities *were* inseparable, this style of
argumentation would be flawed. Reducto ad absurdum disproves only
the worst possible case, because the ability to contrive a particular
example which is obviously flawed does not imply the ability to infer
anything about the entire set of cases. However, it's a common bit
of rhetoric, despite its flaws; I suggest you avoid it in the future,
if you are serious about persuading logical-thinking people rather
than merely those who are easily impressionable.

To attack it from a discursive rather than logical standpoint, look
at your example as one end of a spectrum (simple ideas) versus your
normal level of expression as the other (complex ideas). There are
a number of shades of grey between these two extremes which your
argument tacitly dismisses. I'm sure you're familiar with the
deconstruction of false dichotomies such as this, so I'll leave
it to you to determine the consequences of the above.

Third and finally, your use of labels does more harm than good. You
only communicate your purpose to those who have already taken the time
to understand the ideas expressed by your labels, when the ideas they
describe are only uncommonly known in the context in which you use them.
Because of this, you do little good, but this alone does not make your
use of them harmful; however, you abuse labels:

>>> [...] Fascist [...]

Do read about Godwin's law sometime. Your abuse definitely overstates
your ideas. Regardless of their basic correctness, throwing around
words like "Fascist" implies they have a different magnitude of
importance than they actually do. When you express all of your ideas
with this extreme level, your words cease have any sense of proportion
and one is not sure how seriously to take *any* of your ideas, since
relative to one another they're all roughly the same. What's worse,
many of your ideas aren't intended seriously (the insults as the most
obvious example), which needlessly reduces your own ability to express
your ideas to others.

What is the end result of all of this? You've completely failed to
communicate, sir, and if you'd realize that your ideas can be simply
expressed without reducing their complexity, take the time to put them
in terms people can grasp more easily, and put things in context rather
than aggrandizing each argument on a scale where they all become quite
meaningless, you'd be able to communicate more effectively. Failure to
comply with the above will be taken as an acknowledgment that you're
simply not seriously interested in communication.

And, of course, if you are not interested in communication, then do not
expect me to read your posts. This is your pre-plonk warning. Please
take heed.

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 4, 2000, 1:32:07 AM12/4/00

In article <90f597$o4a$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>,

naisbodo <nais...@enteract.com> wrote:>
> This bit of verbiage lacks context. "The" ideas? Which ideas do you
> mean? "Concepts"? Which concepts do you mean? This didn't answer
his
> post at all! Luckily, you went on to give some more relevant text:
>
> > Look, here are some "simple" ideas: "winning is the only thing"
> > and "down with intelligence!" You want me to be a modern
reductionist
> > sort of dude who distills the lived complexity of software to a few
> > simple formula, and I am not gonna.
>
> Yikes! You're indulging in two fallacies to make your point. Allow
> me to enumerate my arguments for clarity:
>
> First, you unnecessarily create a link between complexity of
expression
> and complexity of thought. Complex thoughts can be expressed in
simple
> ways, and simple thoughts can be expressed in complex ways. In order
> to express complex ideas simply, however, one must have a clear grasp
> of them.
>

This is certainly no law. Like some of Steve's saws it seems to have
authority and generality but that very authority and generality is
undercut by simple counterexamples.

To be brutal, it is not true that any complex thought can be expressed
simply. Ironically, we all accept this as regards science and
mathematics but seem to feel that this does not apply to the humanities
and software engineering.

Shakespeare's plays often express complex thoughts about personality
and human relationships, and his vocabulary was large and likewise his
sentence structure.

Your "simplicity" is a psychological, reader-response predicate which
is an attribute of the reader's reception.

> So why does the realm of academia insist on using "big words" if they
> can do without? Obviously, because expression is made more concise
> using these words. This is desirable because it reduces the level
> of redundancy in communication, which is high in a specific field if
> one is reduced to simple speech. Having a handy label for an idea
> lets you express it without taking the time to explain it. (See my
> third point for the disadvantage to this.)
>
> Now, once you move outside this realm in which everyone understands
> the more concise expression of these ideas, simply because they may
> not be familiar with them or may not know the academic labels, it no
> longer reduces redundancy in communication, because the ideas are not
> commonly expressed. Therefore it behooves the speaker to reduce his
> *expression* to simple forms, even if they are more verbose, when in
> a context where the labels and more concise expressions are unlikely
> to be understood.
>

Sounds like you've neatly made my thoughts inexpressible which as I
have said is the goal of the Foucauldian system: by seemingly
pleasurable means, to make certain thoughts not formulable.

For if you reduce the word count by allowing what you call big words
and what I call terms of art, the writer is under the charge of using
big words and terms of art. If you prohibit the big words, the writer
is charged with verbosity. His thoughts (including his desire for
charity and nuance) are at times conveniently silenced.

> That is to say, you're unnecessarily claiming that you cannot express
> your ideas more simply without reducing the complexity of the ideas
> themselves. Complexity of expression and complexity of thought are
> two separate measures, and your failure to distinguish them is what
> I have labeled your first fallacy.
>

This is a REAL example of impressive-sounding bullshit which truly is
prolix for there is a low "ratio" of words...to true ideas.

For in no final sense can we speak of "measuring complexity" although
software engineers talk as if this is a given. Thought precedes
numeration and therefore to measure complexity is deep nonsense.

This was seen in the early days of software engineering when lines of
code were used as a metric.

"Measuring complexity" is reification for it makes a thing out of a
concept which exists primarily in a network of concepts. It also
allows the measurer's personal bias to be presented as Science.

> Second, you're using the rhetorical tactic of reducto ad absurdum in
> your examples:

"Reductio ad absurdam" (the correct spelling) is not a rhetorical
tactic, it is a valid logical method.

>
> > Look, here are some "simple" ideas: "winning is the only thing"
> > and "down with intelligence!"
>
> Even if the above complexities *were* inseparable, this style of
> argumentation would be flawed. Reducto ad absurdum disproves only
> the worst possible case, because the ability to contrive a particular
> example which is obviously flawed does not imply the ability to infer
> anything about the entire set of cases. However, it's a common bit
> of rhetoric, despite its flaws; I suggest you avoid it in the future,
> if you are serious about persuading logical-thinking people rather
> than merely those who are easily impressionable.

Let me help you out. You're struggling to think, not of the valid
technique of reductio but of the strawman argument.

I was not of course claiming that overemphasis on content-free
simplicity led either to the football Fascism of Vince Lombardi or the
authoritarianism of Franco. This would be a strawman argument.

Instead, I was hoping to form a picture in the reader's mind of the way
authoritarian societies including the modern corporation use anti-
intellectualism to discipline the intellectuals they are forced to hire
to run a technological society. In actuality and from a fiduciary
standpoint, their conduct is perfectly rational: no corporation wants
to let scientists and intellectuals sit around and think about stuff in
general.

But the scientists and intellectuals have in my view a responsibility
(even from the standpoint of their position as employees) to see that
their interests do not coincide with the fiduciary interests of the
firm.

Software developers are employed, in our society, at will. They may as
well realize for their own sanity that yes indeed they are interested
in software for its own sake. Software is fun, software is cool, and
knowing a lot about it may not get you hot chicks but at least keeps
you from being homeless in a basically "fuck you", laissez-faire world.

Software developers therefore have a real interest in working at the
edge of their capabilities which varies at times from the most
effective use of their skills: many firms deliberately hire developers
who are overqualified for the tasks the firm has in mind, promising
(for example) Java work while requiring Cobol work after the
interview. This is sleazy but it shows that developers have
professional interests that do not coincide with fiduciary interests.

In law and in ethics, there is nothing wrong with this. Part of being
an employed adult in a company is putting at least some of your
ambitions on hold, and reconciling them with the goals of the firm.

But parts of software engineering pretend that there is absolutely no
space between the employee's interests and those of the firm, and that
the employee WANTS to be deskilled. This is to me the real reason for
the at times Fascistic insistence on defeating real complexity found in
software engineering rhetoric, for Fascism as a movement is based on
people having no divergent interests from those of the state (or
corporation) and also on a pessismism about mastering the complexity of
negotiating divergent interests of different classes of people.

>
> To attack it from a discursive rather than logical standpoint, look
> at your example as one end of a spectrum (simple ideas) versus your
> normal level of expression as the other (complex ideas). There are
> a number of shades of grey between these two extremes which your
> argument tacitly dismisses. I'm sure you're familiar with the
> deconstruction of false dichotomies such as this, so I'll leave
> it to you to determine the consequences of the above.
>

The problem here is that there is usually no warning, in the form of
gradually darker shades of grey, when authoritarianism appears on the
scene. Brutality has as part of its strategy the element of surprise,
as in Kristallnacht, when German Jews were completely surprised by the
overnight barbarism of their neighbors.

Corporations are not Fascistic states but many corporations are too
authoritarian for their own good (as in the case where work-to-rule
trumps productivity.) I think we need as developers a way, other than
the cyberpunk way, of speaking to power. The cyberpunk way to to
undercut through a higher knowledge of technology. The more human way
would be to be able to address, in a civilised fashion, the socially
repressive elements of technology.

For example, for every 100 developers willing to ignore standards and
to deliberately place logic bombs in their code in order to maintain
their position, there is 1 or fewer Ellen Ullmans. Ullman, the author
of Close to the Machine, a book about being a programmer, simply
refused a client's request that she insert keystroke monitoring in a
routine the client had requested because Ellen did not believe workers
should be subject to keystroke monitoring. I happen to disagree with
her view (I think a keystroke monitor could be employee friendly since
it could allow the employee to create macros) but note that Ellen
simply spoke up instead of trying to evade the issue like a
cyberpunkette.

> Third and finally, your use of labels does more harm than good. You
> only communicate your purpose to those who have already taken the time
> to understand the ideas expressed by your labels, when the ideas they
> describe are only uncommonly known in the context in which you use
them.
> Because of this, you do little good, but this alone does not make your
> use of them harmful; however, you abuse labels:
>
> >>> [...] Fascist [...]
>

The label "Fascist" has turned into a sort of verbal stinkbomb but note
that I, in my wordy way, talked of tendencies towards authoritarianism
which at moments of crisis do become Fascist.

My understanding of Fascism is not based on Spielberg's movies but
instead on research on "The Authoritarian Personality" performed by
Theodore Adorno in the 1940s. Adorno's thesis was that in societies in
economic crisis (such as Weimar Germany) working and middle class
support for Fascism grows out of people's personal tendencies to
internalize superego commands AT VARIANCE from their desires.

In corporations in economic crisis, people internalize authority
without resolving the personal conflicts they create. In our business,
they work absurd hours without really wanting to, and they take out the
anger on easy targets, such as that bozo who wrote that program you're
trying to fix. This is safer than questioning whether the program
needs to be rewritten, in somewhat the same way it was safer to elect
Hitler than to call for true economic reform of Germany after WWI.

> Do read about Godwin's law sometime. Your abuse definitely overstates
> your ideas. Regardless of their basic correctness, throwing around
> words like "Fascist" implies they have a different magnitude of
> importance than they actually do. When you express all of your ideas
> with this extreme level, your words cease have any sense of proportion
> and one is not sure how seriously to take *any* of your ideas, since
> relative to one another they're all roughly the same. What's worse,
> many of your ideas aren't intended seriously (the insults as the most
> obvious example), which needlessly reduces your own ability to express
> your ideas to others.
>

I haven't called Steve McConnell a fascist, at all, and he probably
scores low on Adorno's authoritarianism scale. I've used the word in a
completely different context, and it is as if the word was not properly
parsed, but seen as a hot-button or keyword. This, basically, is not
my problem, for the seriousness of labor problems in our industry
(including divorce and suicide) warrants calling a spade a spade.

You're essentially trying to persuade me to rejoin the problem set, of
people who phrase false notions in a digestible form. As I've said, I
did not dare put this into expression when my kids were young and I
know the dangers of expressing them.

One thing I have noticed. When someone sets off a stinkbomb such as
the truth in a project heading for disaster, he is usually not a
popular kinda guy. My hero Dijkstra, after all, was sidelined after he
spoke the truth about PL/I and software engineering.

Part of the problem set is the very metaphor "the marketplace of
ideas." I sell my labor: I do not try to sell my ideas.

> What is the end result of all of this? You've completely failed to
> communicate, sir, and if you'd realize that your ideas can be simply
> expressed without reducing their complexity, take the time to put them
> in terms people can grasp more easily, and put things in context
rather
> than aggrandizing each argument on a scale where they all become quite
> meaningless, you'd be able to communicate more effectively. Failure
to
> comply with the above will be taken as an acknowledgment that you're
> simply not seriously interested in communication.

"People" is the interesting word here, for it reifies the notion of the
statistical mean. I am not speaking to dots on a chart. I am speaking
to persons, to perhaps the one guy (or hopefully, hot chick) who gets
it.

>
> And, of course, if you are not interested in communication, then do
not
> expect me to read your posts. This is your pre-plonk warning. Please
> take heed.

The more people, who waste my time with pretentious discussions of
literary style, who *plonk* me, the better.

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 4, 2000, 1:44:16 AM12/4/00

In article <3a2b1379...@news.shuswap.net>,

ge...@shuswap.net wrote:
> spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> >I have found that people who are quick with the charge of prolixity
use
> >it as a timesaver when they simply do not care, for a good reason, a
> >bad reason, or no reason at all, to address the issues that were
> >raised. You haven't explained the lack of content, and as for
critical
>
> Interesting. I've found that people who retreat behind dense
> jargon-laden polysyllablism are often trying to hide that they don't
> know what they are talking about. Sometimes, they hide their
> ignorance from themselves, but are usually less successful in fooling
> others.

Gee, my experience in programming is quite the opposite. If you can
say "This module does this", accurately, using as many words as it
takes, you know more than the inarticulate bozo who just codes.

It is TRUE that great modules are what Ed Yourdon calls functionally
bound and that as a result, their description is a simple
sentence: "calculate the square root of the input number."

But note, of course, that Yourdon's taxonomy of binding had to admit
other levels, and that in the REAL world, the writing that accurately
describes the function of a module is more complex: "this module reads
the FOO record set and deletes all noncurrent records."

The real problems occur not when the commenter or presenter is overly
verbally facile (although the folk myth in data processing, based on
social inequality but unspeakable as such, is indeed that all overly
facile presenters are bullshitters.) It occurs when the program
comments have no relation to each other ("this module advances the
printer and also makes coffee") and when the presenter stumbles and is
reduced to silence.

>
> You'd do much better to put down that thesaurus and write
> plainly. It would mean that many more people would be able to
> understand you. That is a good thing assuming that your ideas are
> worth anyone reading about. Well, are they?
>

You assume that I'm using a thesaurus and you cannot admit that *le mot
juste* just occurs to me...after a 16 hour day coding Visual Basic
(this, by the way, is the truth.) This is to have a downsized view of
human abilities which is part of the problem set. Perhaps I am a
monster: a recent employer described me as "Ed, the technical monster"
in a brochure. Perhaps I am a Cartesian evil genius, but as far as I
can tell, I am an ordinary slob who doesn't get laid a lot, and
sublimates like a Good Boy. Would you rather I was a sex addict?

> [snip]
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Gene Wirchenko
>
> Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation:
> I have preferences.
> You have biases.
> He/She has prejudices.
>

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 4, 2000, 1:58:47 AM12/4/00

In article <t2latec...@corp.supernews.com>,

"Al Dunbar" <Al_D...@HoTMaiL.com> wrote:
>
> In deference to Mr. Gilb, whose works I have not read, I would assume
that
> his "high class phraseology" was combined with actual content, rather
than
> simply being there for its own sake.
>

Yeah, it was. He gave techniques that I put to use for defaulting
fields in a humanistic fashion. He assumed that the programmer would
be able to spend time on this.

However, part of the problem with software engineering is that it is
used to "discipline" programmers into writing just the code the
designers think is necessary. Despite all their talk about "the user",
the designers do not mean the actual computer operator. They mean the
owners of the firm, who typically don't give a rat's ass that their
input operators have carpal tunnel syndrome from entering common
defaults.

Humanized input would have avoided, for example, the problems in the
Florida recount. An intelligent programmer of an electronic voting
machine would have displayed a message saying "are you sure you want to
vote for TWO candidates?" but note that under rigid software
engineering discipline, our boy would have been handed a set of
rigid "specs", and (because the so-called architects had hogged most of
the development time making pretty charts in Visio) our boy would not
have the time to consider the problem of illogical input.

The "software engineering" vision is after all one of dividing task
planning from execution in an area, that of software development, where
this division often makes no sense. Software engineering seems to
systematically ignore the fact that the intelligent programmer is
uniquely positioned to see marginal cases (such as caused the Florida
mess.) But by taking the real rationality (of planning a task and then
executing it) and fetishizing and reifying it, software engineering
does cause more problems than it solves.

I'd suggest, Al, that reading some of the texts might help your case,
and that part of my verbosity is simply a density of references.

> > I am somewhat arrogantly trying to give a name and form to what I
have
>
> "somewhat"? :-)
>
> > seen as success in software development and universally it seems to
me
> > that software is most successful when it is critical, human, pro-
labor,
> > compassionate. Of course, I do not mean financial success,
> > necessarily. I mean instead a holistic success in which NO
> > stakeholder, including the programmers, pay for the success with
> > exhaustion, broken marriages, and other tragedies.
>
> Sorry, but, on this point at least, I will have to AGREE with you. I
would
> bet, however, that many of those people whose lives you want to
protect from
> abuse perpetrated on them by the establishment would get not much
more than
> a good laugh out of your verbose rants on their behalf. You would
likely say
> that that is because they are not your philosophical equal. To that I
say I
> am glad.
>

We don't need no namby pamby stinkin do-gooder elitists to help us out.

>
> Actually, I do not feel that way. I have often suspected your
inability to
> understand what others say; it appears that sarcasm is just one more
thing
> you have difficulty discerning. :-)
>
> > I am not a Turing experiment although I am
> > almost as weird as Turing was.
>
> This fact has been made abundantly clear.

I'm not gay, although there's nothing wrong with that :-).
>
> /Al
>
> > > <snip - we have already seen enough of this>

Al Dunbar

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Dec 4, 2000, 2:14:14 AM12/4/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:90eu74$v64$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <x7d7f93...@hana.snafu.org>,
> Marco S Hyman <ma...@snafu.org> wrote:
> > spino...@my-deja.com writes:
> >

<snip>

> This is possibly the major reason why I remain "verbose."

I thought you remained verbose in order to disprove our assertion that you
were verbose, a statement that you took exception to some posts ago.

/Al

Al Dunbar

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Dec 4, 2000, 2:14:52 AM12/4/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:90f0bd$sj$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <t2lsipe...@corp.supernews.com>,> > >
> > > The difference between you obvious satire is that I have a real
> social
> > > and political goal, and where my syntax is complex it is actually
> > > trying to be fair.
> >
> > Methinks he is weakening, as evidenced by the obvious grammatical
> error in
> > the sentence above :-)
>
> The sentence was inapposite but technically correct.

No it wasn't. Granted that the "you obvious satire" was a typo for "youR
obvious satire", it still behooves you when referring to the "difference
between" to have two things between which there is a difference, not just
one thing. Extrapolating from the partial sentence, I assume that you really
meant to say something along the lines of:

"The difference between youR obvious satire AND MY MUCH MORE BRILLIANT
DISCOURSIVE STYLE is that I have a real social and political goal, and where

my syntax is complex it is actually trying to be fair."

> > > I have no personal problem with this for believe it or
> > > not I do not take myself all that seriously. My concern is that
> this
> > > pre-emptive debate about prolixity forestalls any real discussion of
> > > the ways in which software developers are being materially screwed.
> >
> > In that case, why do you not start a new thread entitled "the ways in
> which
> > software developers are being materially screwed". Perhaps I would
> discover
> > more about Steve McConnells book by following that thread, as I have
> > certainly learned nothing here.
> >
> I've got a fabulous idea. Why don't you just READ his book, or pay me
> to write a summary?

Read maybe; pay you, not likely. How could I be sure of getting value for
money based on the extent of my knowledge about your writing style? Also,
your summary is sure to vastly exceed the original in volume, whether
measured in pages, words, concepts, or the time it takes to wade through it.

> > > >
> > > No, I will NOT adapt to the group in which I post.
> >
> > Ergo, he *is* a Troll.
>
> We are having another Foucauldian moment, for it has long been an
> article of faith among libertarian digerati that we gots like total
> free speech on de Internet now since anybody can say anything. An
> implication frequently drawn is that old time liberals and the
> Politically Correct do not have our libertarian committment to free
> speech because they would materially restrict "hate" speech.
>
> The Foucauldian moment is to apply an apparently pleasurable
> description, not to views, but to persons expressing the view. As so
> often happens in American culture, the person is in a lighthearted way
> reduced to a cartoon: here a hairy gnome who lives under a bridge and
> who has a tendency to harass fair maidens.

If anyone has reduced you to a cartoon, it is not me. Mind you, you also
tried the same trick against me a few posts back ("go back to your
Dilbertized..."). I take it from this that you are not much different in
substance from that which you rail against.

> > > That is because the
> > > Internet statistically over-represents the worst elements in our
> > > society, weighted as it is towards physical cowards, truly pompous
> neo-
> > > conservatives, Ku Kluxers, and people like Scientologists and
> Holocaust
> > > deniers who use the lack of friction implicit in electronic
> technology
> > > to spread vicious lies at the speed of light.
> >
> > Hey, some of us will agree to some of that, however, trying to change
> the
> > statistical balance all on your own by the sheer volume of text is
> certainly
> > an onerous task, if an ineffective one.
> >
> I type fast.

...and it shows.

/Al

Heinz W. Wiggeshoff

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Dec 4, 2000, 2:34:30 AM12/4/00

Ariel Scolnicov (ari...@compugen.co.il) writes:
>
> Eschew sesquipedilianism!

Thank you for that new addition to my Scrabble word list.
Of course, I'll be playing with two letter racks now.

(If this stupid thread doesn't die soon, no harm in making it
amusing, right?)

Al Dunbar

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Dec 4, 2000, 2:35:44 AM12/4/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:90eva5$2k$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <t2lrsvr...@corp.supernews.com>,
> "Al Dunbar" <Al_D...@HoTMaiL.com> wrote:>

> > > Now, this in itself does not indicate that I am not verbose. The
> only
> > > accurate definition of verbosity lies not in raw word count but in
> the
> > > RATIO of words to needed and/or original ideas.
> >
> > OKOK, so you are not verbose. Now tell us what the word is that means
> that
> > you are so interested in contemplating the wonderfulness of your own
> > somewhat voluminous use of the language, that you are willing to
> sacrifice
> > almost any opportunity you might have to make your actual meaning
> clear by
> > shrouding it in so much double-speak that even those that might
> otherwise

> > agree with some of your points are becoming exasperated????

> >
> While I take pleasure in concepts, I am not thrilled with the
> wonderfulness of the ideas. They are pessimistic as regards the future.

As was I regarding the likelihood that you could answer a simple question
either simply or in your usual style. Maybe that is because I forgot the
question mark. Look up and you will see four of them.

> This is really beginning to piss me off, because one of the major
> reasons I was as you say verbose was an attempt to be fair to Steve
> McConnell, who I briefly met in 1995 and whose book Code Complete is an
> excellent piecea work.

This must be the height of irony! You recognizing "Code Complete" as an
excellent piece of work, when it is so well crafted that it accurately
conveys the author's ideas using the most straightforward and approachable
style imaginable.

<snip>

> This is a serious fucking matter. Commencing in the 1980s, highly
> skilled programmers who were all too willing and able to learn new
> technologies were fired less for technical reasons and more for
> rhetorical and cultural reasons.

I think it is time someone called you on your unsubstantiated statements.
Name one person that was fired in the manner stated, and/or provide some
documentation to indicate that this was indeed the case.

> > <snip - "I begin to weary of this motif" - Didi, Waiting for Godot
> (or was
> > that Gogo?)>
> >
> Hip weariness is part of the problem for it too manufactures going with
> the flow.

Is it possible that we could say anything that did not somehow only confirm
your beliefs in some manner without your even having to agree with us?

Al Dunbar

unread,

Dec 4, 2000, 2:51:48 AM12/4/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:90fdp8$aen$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <90f597$o4a$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>,
> naisbodo <nais...@enteract.com> wrote:>

<snip>

> I was not of course claiming that overemphasis on content-free
> simplicity led either to the football Fascism of Vince Lombardi or the
> authoritarianism of Franco. This would be a strawman argument.
>
> Instead, I was hoping to form a picture in the reader's mind of the way
> authoritarian societies including the modern corporation use anti-
> intellectualism to discipline the intellectuals they are forced to hire
> to run a technological society.

Unfortunately, I think the consensus is that you have not succeeded in your
attempt.

<snip>

> You're essentially trying to persuade me to rejoin the problem set, of
> people who phrase false notions in a digestible form.

No. We would prefer you to stop phrasing possibly true notions in an
essentially indigestible form.

> As I've said, I
> did not dare put this into expression when my kids were young and I
> know the dangers of expressing them.

Hmmmm... you were trying to protect your kids from a flame war?

/Al

naisbodo

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Dec 4, 2000, 2:54:59 AM12/4/00

In comp.programming spino...@my-deja.com wrote:

> The more people, who waste my time

Waste *your* time??? I spent quite a bit of time trying to prepare a
carefully reasoned reply to satisfy your requirements to discuss matters
at *your* level, going out of my way even though you're being completely
rude and irresponsible in the group.

If you thought *I* was wasting your time, put yourself in my shoes or
anyone else's. You might realize that it's a good idea to take a few
years off of Usenet and stop wasting everyone *else's* time with your
bullshit.

> with pretentious

Who are *you* to call anyone pretentious? If someone asks you to speak
on their level, you spew bullshit at them. If someone responds to you
on your own level, you spew bullshit at them. Get a clue, anyone can
get a book published--it doesn't mean you know what you're talking
about, no matter how good you are at name dropping.

> who *plonk* me, the better.

Since you obviously have no intent of communicating with anyone, let
alone a "hot chick" (You realize that's offensive to some of us?), you
leave no choice on this one.

I naively thought you might have pure motives, and that you were having
serious issues in your attempts to communicate, which I might be able to
help you resolve through a bit of logical discussion. You've allowed me
to thoroughly establish that this is not the case, and in fact, you are
a troll and you care nothing for discussion, at any level.

This is, I hope, valuable to anyone else who might have been unsure as to
whether or not you were simply trolling. The more people who plonk you,
the better. Much better for them if they haven't wasted their own
precious time attempting to communicate with you.

*plonk*

Flamingly yours,

Al Dunbar

unread,

Dec 4, 2000, 2:58:01 AM12/4/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:90feg0$b23$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <3a2b1379...@news.shuswap.net>,
> ge...@shuswap.net wrote:
> > spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
> >
> > [snip]
> >

<snip>

> > You'd do much better to put down that thesaurus and write
> > plainly. It would mean that many more people would be able to
> > understand you. That is a good thing assuming that your ideas are
> > worth anyone reading about. Well, are they?
> >
> You assume that I'm using a thesaurus and you cannot admit that *le mot
> juste* just occurs to me...after a 16 hour day coding Visual Basic
> (this, by the way, is the truth.)

Gene's thesaurus comment was purely allegorical. We all know that if you
truly used a thesaurus you might make more sense.

> This is to have a downsized view of
> human abilities which is part of the problem set. Perhaps I am a
> monster: a recent employer described me as "Ed, the technical monster"
> in a brochure. Perhaps I am a Cartesian evil genius, but as far as I
> can tell, I am an ordinary slob who doesn't get laid a lot,

So much for your theory that your style of language is a chick magnet.

/Al

Al Dunbar

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Dec 4, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/4/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:90ffb6$bgf$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <t2latec...@corp.supernews.com>,
> "Al Dunbar" <Al_D...@HoTMaiL.com> wrote:
> >
> > In deference to Mr. Gilb, whose works I have not read, I would assume
> that
> > his "high class phraseology" was combined with actual content, rather
> than
> > simply being there for its own sake.
> >
> Yeah, it was. He gave techniques that I put to use for defaulting
> fields in a humanistic fashion.

Well, in that case, you almost seem to be agreeing with me on the nature of
the difference between his "high class phraseology" and your own. Either
that, or you are once again failing to understand the implications of a
simple statement.

> I'd suggest, Al, that reading some of the texts might help your case,
> and that part of my verbosity is simply a density of references.

Exactly. It is as if you cannot speak directly on your own, but need to
constantly make references to various philosophers and others in the
mistaken belief that this will impress the fight out of the opposition.

<snip>

> > > I am not a Turing experiment although I am
> > > almost as weird as Turing was.
> >
> > This fact has been made abundantly clear.
>
> I'm not gay, although there's nothing wrong with that :-).

Ahh, now we are having a Seinfeldian moment, are we?

/Al

Richard Heathfield

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Dec 4, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/4/00

spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> In article <90f597$o4a$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>,
> naisbodo <nais...@enteract.com> wrote:>

<snip>

> >
> > Yikes! You're indulging in two fallacies to make your point. Allow
> > me to enumerate my arguments for clarity:
> >
> > First, you unnecessarily create a link between complexity of
> expression
> > and complexity of thought. Complex thoughts can be expressed in
> simple
> > ways, and simple thoughts can be expressed in complex ways. In order
> > to express complex ideas simply, however, one must have a clear grasp
> > of them.

Let's read this quotation very carefully before we continue - naisbodo
has not said "all complex thoughts can be expressed in simple ways". The
statement "complex thoughts can be expressed in simple ways" is mildly
ambiguous, but a well-balanced person would conclude that naisbodo is
not trying to propose that 100% of complex thoughts can be expressed
simply, for the simple reason that such an attempt would be vulnerable
to a single counter-example, and naisbodo is not dumb enough to open
himself up to such an accusation unless he knows he can support it. In
this case, the "implied all" case is insupportable, so I assume he meant
the "implied some" case.

> >
> This is certainly no law. Like some of Steve's saws it seems to have
> authority and generality but that very authority and generality is
> undercut by simple counterexamples.
>
> To be brutal, it is not true that any complex thought can be expressed
> simply.

It is true, however, that some complex thoughts can be expressed simply.
You are trying to extend naisbodo's position to a point where it can be
defeated - in other words, you're "setting up a strawman".

> Ironically, we all accept this as regards science and
> mathematics

Simple examples of complex thought which can be expressed simply:

F = ma (from Newtonian mechanics)
E = mcc (from relativity theory - sorry for the absence of
subscripts...)

> but seem to feel that this does not apply to the humanities
> and software engineering.

Since you're talking about software engineering, I might as well point
out that the IOCCC is a marvellous example of how *simple* thoughts can
be expressed in a *complex* way.

>
> Shakespeare's plays often express complex thoughts about personality
> and human relationships, and his vocabulary was large and likewise his
> sentence structure.

Sure. So?

>
> Your "simplicity" is a psychological, reader-response predicate which
> is an attribute of the reader's reception.

How do you know that? Perhaps his simplicity is just simple.

Defining simplicity is actually an alarmingly complex activity!

<snip>

> For if you reduce the word count by allowing what you call big words
> and what I call terms of art, the writer is under the charge of using
> big words and terms of art. If you prohibit the big words, the writer
> is charged with verbosity. His thoughts (including his desire for
> charity and nuance) are at times conveniently silenced.

There's a place to use big words, and that place is in a forum and
context where everyone likely to read or hear those words is likely to
garner your intended meaning, and where communication is more effective
because of the bigness of the words.

There's a place to use little words, and that place is in a forum and
context where the bigger words would confuse a significant proportion of
your audience or readership. In this case, the forum is
comp.programming, a technical discussion newsgroup (always re-read
before posting! - I note that this is cross-posted to two newsgroups
with which I am unfamiliar, alt.folklore.computers and comp.software-eng
- so I don't know whether my point is valid in those newsgroups), but
the context has little or nothing to do with the technical side of
programming. Therefore, leaving topicality issues aside for the moment,
little words are appropriate. Those big words which don't enjoy wide
understanding within the programming community which this newsgroup (or
these newsgroups!) represents should either be defined as you go or
eschewed (rejected) altogether.

>
> > That is to say, you're unnecessarily claiming that you cannot express
> > your ideas more simply without reducing the complexity of the ideas
> > themselves. Complexity of expression and complexity of thought are
> > two separate measures, and your failure to distinguish them is what
> > I have labeled your first fallacy.
> >
> This is a REAL example of impressive-sounding bullshit which truly is
> prolix for there is a low "ratio" of words...to true ideas.

Not really. It's possible to call a spade a manually operated
agricultural excavation implement, and it's possible to summarise the
complex behaviour of a body in a gravitational field with a simple
equation. Therefore, examples exist which show that it is possible for
complexity of expression to be unrelated to complexity of thought, and
therefore they are separate measures. Therefore, he is correct.

>
> For in no final sense can we speak of "measuring complexity" although
> software engineers talk as if this is a given. Thought precedes
> numeration and therefore to measure complexity is deep nonsense.

To measure complexity objectively is difficult, if not impossible. To
measure it heuristically and subjectively is something most people
reading this newsgroup will do on most days. Hardly nonsense.

>
> This was seen in the early days of software engineering when lines of
> code were used as a metric.

It was not foolish to seek to measure software complexity. It is foolish
to use lines of code as your sole metric. We "know" intuitively that a
10,000,000 line program is more complex than a 10 line program. What we
can't know is that a 2,000 line program is more complex than a 1,000
line program.

> "Measuring complexity" is reification for it makes a thing out of a
> concept which exists primarily in a network of concepts. It also
> allows the measurer's personal bias to be presented as Science.

Measuring complexity is something we do every day. The fact that we
can't measure it with a ruler or a balance is neither here nor there -
we make heuristic judgements of complexity regularly. Sometimes,
therefore, we make wrong judgements. But we get it right often enough
that we consider it worth continuing to do.

>
> > Second, you're using the rhetorical tactic of reducto ad absurdum in
> > your examples:
>
> "Reductio ad absurdam" (the correct spelling)

The Web is not known for its devotion to accuracy. Nevertheless, here
are some Web search findings:

reducto ad absurdum (naisbodo's spelling): 179 hits

reductio ad absurdam (your spelling): 206 hits

reductio ad absurdum (my spelling): 7140 hits

reductio ad absurdem (a spelling I've seen elsewhere): 117 hits

So, your spelling is more popular than naisbodo's, but considerably less
popular than mine. That doesn't mean you're wrong, but it does mean you
need to defend your accusation with a reference to an independent
authority on the Latin language who supports your view, or withdraw the
accusation altogether.

> is not a rhetorical
> tactic, it is a valid logical method.

Indeed it is. It is also a rhetorical tactic.

>
> > Third and finally, your use of labels does more harm than good. You
> > only communicate your purpose to those who have already taken the time
> > to understand the ideas expressed by your labels, when the ideas they
> > describe are only uncommonly known in the context in which you use
> them.
> > Because of this, you do little good, but this alone does not make your
> > use of them harmful; however, you abuse labels:
> >
> > >>> [...] Fascist [...]
> >
> The label "Fascist" has turned into a sort of verbal stinkbomb

Indeed.

> but note
> that I, in my wordy way, talked of tendencies towards authoritarianism
> which at moments of crisis do become Fascist.
>
> My understanding of Fascism is not based on Spielberg's movies but
> instead on research on "The Authoritarian Personality" performed by
> Theodore Adorno in the 1940s. Adorno's thesis was that in societies in
> economic crisis (such as Weimar Germany) working and middle class
> support for Fascism grows out of people's personal tendencies to
> internalize superego commands AT VARIANCE from their desires.

The problem here is that most people reading this newsgroup (I am
replying in comp.programming) are likely to have formed their
understanding of Fascism either from Spielberg's movies or from
poorly-remembered history lessons. They don't view it in the same
precise way that you do, and (as you pointed out) the word has become
highly emotive rather than descriptive. This can impede understanding.

> I haven't called Steve McConnell a fascist, at all, and he probably
> scores low on Adorno's authoritarianism scale. I've used the word in a
> completely different context, and it is as if the word was not properly
> parsed, but seen as a hot-button or keyword.

This was a predictable outcome. It seems surprising that you did not
predict it.

> This, basically, is not
> my problem, for the seriousness of labor problems in our industry
> (including divorce and suicide) warrants calling a spade a spade.

Quite so. So why do you use such terribly long and unfamiliar words, in
a newsgroup where many of the readership won't understand what *you*
mean by those words, even if they recognise the words themselves?

> You're essentially trying to persuade me to rejoin the problem set, of
> people who phrase false notions in a digestible form.

How about joining the solution set, of people who phrase true notions in
a digestible form?

<snip>

--
Richard Heathfield
"Usenet is a strange place." - Dennis M Ritchie, 29 July 1999.
C FAQ: http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html
K&R Answers: http://users.powernet.co.uk/eton/kandr2/index.html

donald tees

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Dec 4, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/4/00

spino...@my-deja.com wrote in message <90eu74$v64$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...

>
>The Foucauldian moment asserts power using pleasure. Therefore, your
>slogan trivializes the very real lack of opportunity for inner city
>people...and also, through oversimplification, characterises all of
>them as pushers, whereas in reality the statistical majority conducts
>itself at a personal level better than upper middle class white people,
>simply because retribution for "lifestyle experimentation" is so brutal
>in the inner city.
>
>This is possibly the major reason why I remain "verbose." 1960s
>politics of slogans and bumper stickers turned liberation into friendly
>fascism.
>>

Harumph.

Using vocabulary designed to impress your audience rather than educating
them does not help. In fact, it further marginalizes your cause. If you
really
want to do something about it, get off your ass, come up here, and I will
give
a programming job in a crack cocaine clinic. This programming office has
put a addict through re-hab every year for the last five. The techniques
are a lot more basic than ranting on about bricolege and Nietzche. You have
to go out on the street and get your hands dirty. Starting a soup kitchen
would be more to the point.

Donald<an old hippie programmer and ex addict>

Tim Bradshaw

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Dec 4, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/4/00

"donald tees" <don...@willmack.com> writes:

> Using vocabulary designed to impress your audience rather than
> educating them does not help.

Of course it helps: it helps improve your academic credentials, which
is why people write this stuff.

> In fact, it further marginalizes your cause. If you really want to
> do something about it, get off your ass, come up here, and I will
> give a programming job in a crack cocaine clinic. This programming
> office has put a addict through re-hab every year for the last five.
> The techniques are a lot more basic than ranting on about bricolege
> and Nietzche. You have to go out on the street and get your hands
> dirty. Starting a soup kitchen would be more to the point.

Again, I think you're missing the point. You assume that people who
write this stuff want to help solve real-world problems: they don't,
they want to have academic careers and impress people at dinner
parties.

--tim

Jeff York

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Dec 4, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/4/00

>It was cultural. Both Jerry and I had been educated by Catholic
>priests who gave higher grades to longer papers IF there were no errors
>in grammar and spelling. Educated Roman Catholics share with educated
>Arabs, and other cultures supposed more primitive than American free-
>market Protestantism, a love of language whereas in the dominant
>culture time and language are forms of money. ..

I too have a deep love of language. However, once the signal to noise
ratio becomes vanishingly small, content gives way to the sterility of
nothing better than mere mental masturbation..

--
Jeff. Ironbridge, Shrops, U.K.
je...@jakfield.xu-netx.com (remove the x..x round u-net for return address)

... "There are few hours in life more agreeable
than the hour dedicated to the ceremony
known as afternoon tea.."

Henry James, (1843 - 1916).

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 4, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/4/00

In article <90g6oq$5lg$1...@news.igs.net>,
"donald tees" <don...@willmack.com> wrote:
> spino...@my-deja.com wrote in message <90eu74$v64
$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...

> >
> >The Foucauldian moment asserts power using pleasure. Therefore, your
> >slogan trivializes the very real lack of opportunity for inner city
> >people...and also, through oversimplification, characterises all of
> >them as pushers, whereas in reality the statistical majority conducts
> >itself at a personal level better than upper middle class white
people,
> >simply because retribution for "lifestyle experimentation" is so
brutal
> >in the inner city.
> >
> >This is possibly the major reason why I remain "verbose." 1960s
> >politics of slogans and bumper stickers turned liberation into
friendly
> >fascism.
> >>
>

> Harumph.

>
> Using vocabulary designed to impress your audience rather than
educating

> them does not help. In fact, it further marginalizes your cause.

If you
> really
> want to do something about it, get off your ass, come up here, and I
will
> give
> a programming job in a crack cocaine clinic. This programming office
has
> put a addict through re-hab every year for the last five. The
techniques
> are a lot more basic than ranting on about bricolege and Nietzche.
You have
> to go out on the street and get your hands dirty. Starting a soup
kitchen
> would be more to the point.
>

> Donald<an old hippie programmer and ex addict>

I've already described how I taught at an inner city trade school. I
also have done volunteer work of the sort you describe, and I myself am
a member of a recovery community.

To me, part of recovery is letting go of personal illusions, and some
of these illusions are formed by culture; it can be considered a form
of deconstruction. For me, one of the illusions of which I let go in
recovery was my fear of being thought pretentious or "verbose" if I let
my light shine. In and out of recovery, I've read a lot of books and
had a lot of street experience, and recovery groups taught me that part
of my problem was trying to be a "real man"...by hiding my knowledge
and speaking in grunts.

I found in the inner city that people actually WANTED to here a shine-
on white boy tell them about Alan Turing, and were confident of their
street ability to filter out his bullshit. Younger people, of all
races, are hungry for any sort of adult male mentoring they can get,
even from an aging shine-on white boy.

For example, I was working out by swimming at the Oak Street Beach last
summer, and some African-American youths asked me to teach them how to
swim. Because of the goddamn neoconservatives and their goddamn war
on "frills" such as midnight basketball and gym class, these kids no
longer had access even to the fucking YMCA, which has been taken over
by the white middle class.

In early recovery I taught a computer training class. I was afraid of
introducing personal insights on the subject matter (the C programming
language) but the president of the training firm, a personal friend who
knew my recovery history, told me that while some of what I wanted to
say was BS other consisted of valuable personal experience in
programming that would make the class more interesting.

It is true that many addicts hide their fear and addiction behind a sea
of words. But other addicts (especially men) fail to verbalize ENOUGH.

Marco S Hyman

unread,

Dec 4, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/4/00

> > > ALSO find good ideas in B school work. If few add to or transmit from
> > > human knowledge *per se*, their value nonetheless resides in the way
> > > they enhance people's lives, by, for example, showing them how to
> > > program in Visual Basic, and thereby earn a living without selling
> > > drugs. Some of the work done at the private, for-profit University of
> >
> > Visual Basic: it keeps pushers off the streets!
>
> Note the Foucauldian moment we are enjoying here. I learned Visual

Nope. I just applied a little Strunk and White to your statement.
Perhaps it's time for you to review "The Elements of Style" again.
May I suggest sections "V.6 Do not overwrite" and "V.7 Do not overstate".

// marc

Peter Seebach

unread,

Dec 4, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/4/00

In article <90ehr2$m12$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, <spino...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>Now, this in itself does not indicate that I am not verbose.

I stopped reading at this point, because I lost track of why I had started
reading.

-s
--
Copyright 2000, All rights reserved. Peter Seebach / se...@plethora.net
C/Unix wizard, Pro-commerce radical, Spam fighter. Boycott Spamazon!
Consulting & Computers: http://www.plethora.net/

Peter Seebach

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Dec 4, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/4/00

In article <3A2B6F01...@antlimited.com>,

Richard Heathfield <ric...@antlimited.com> wrote:
>Since you're talking about software engineering, I might as well point
>out that the IOCCC is a marvellous example of how *simple* thoughts can
>be expressed in a *complex* way.

And we're nearly done! Really! I mean it! In about half an hour we'll
be discussing the final winners. :)

Peter Seebach

unread,

Dec 4, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/4/00

In article <90feg0$b23$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, <spino...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>In article <3a2b1379...@news.shuswap.net>,
> ge...@shuswap.net wrote:
>> Interesting. I've found that people who retreat behind dense
>> jargon-laden polysyllablism are often trying to hide that they don't
>> know what they are talking about. Sometimes, they hide their
>> ignorance from themselves, but are usually less successful in fooling
>> others.

>Gee, my experience in programming is quite the opposite.

Really?

>If you can
>say "This module does this", accurately, using as many words as it
>takes, you know more than the inarticulate bozo who just codes.

Certainly.

But if, instead, you go on for three pages using big words that aren't
necessary, you probably know less than the guy who actually wrote *only*
as many words as it takes, rather than a great deal of extra wording.

Marco S Hyman

unread,

Dec 4, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/4/00

> So you can take your Strunk and White and shove it up your ass (and how
> is that for simple, manly, Anglo-Saxon style?) Lanham points out that

Short, simple, and to-the-point. Too bad you didn't start your
little essay with this comment. It would have placed the remainder
of your thoughts in their proper context.

// marc

Al Dunbar

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Dec 4, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/4/00

<spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message
news:90hkqa$4l7$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...

> In article <3A2B6F01...@antlimited.com>,
> Richard Heathfield <ric...@antlimited.com> wrote:

> > spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
> > >
> > > In article <90f597$o4a$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>,
> > > naisbodo <nais...@enteract.com> wrote:>

> It is arrogant because you define the audience. Nothing gives you that
> right.

> Bite me. I know a little Latin, and if you think for one fucking
> minute I am going to take the votes of thousands of mental defectives
> you've got another thing coming.

What gives *you* the right? At least Richard's definition of the audience
was polite.

/Al

spino...@my-deja.com

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Dec 4, 2000, 8:42:57 PM12/4/00

In article <nkjk89g...@tfeb.org>,
Tim Bradshaw <t...@tfeb.org> wrote:

> "donald tees" <don...@willmack.com> writes:
>
> > Using vocabulary designed to impress your audience rather than
> > educating them does not help.
>

> Of course it helps: it helps improve your academic credentials, which
> is why people write this stuff.

The folk notion that contemporary academics write in order to advance
their careers is wrong.

First of all, publish or perish is only true at first-tier
institutions. Less prestigious private colleges and many state schools
have written policies that place teaching first, and opportunities for
any kind of research are treated as perks and rewards for loyalty. Use
of these opportunities at these schools is not so much career advancing
as a SIGN of favor.

For example, the chair of the department of philosophy where I went to
school published several books while at my school and subsequently at a
state school. He was nominated at the end of his career for a state
award but did not receive it because, he was told, he had written TOO
MUCH. This is publish and perish, for to write several books attracted
the resentment of the faculty who found it difficult to maintain this
man's productivity while at the same time having his heavy teaching
load.

Second and most important, it might occur to you that hard-working,
underpaid academics resent the very idea that by doing a significant
part of their jobs as typically understood, participating in the
production of knowledge, they are thereby being pretentious little
twits. Perhaps you would like a society in which the only intellectual
work performed was immediately paid for, and changed to private
property.

>
> > In fact, it further marginalizes your cause. If you really want to
> > do something about it, get off your ass, come up here, and I will
> > give a programming job in a crack cocaine clinic. This programming
> > office has put a addict through re-hab every year for the last five.
> > The techniques are a lot more basic than ranting on about bricolege
> > and Nietzche. You have to go out on the street and get your hands
> > dirty. Starting a soup kitchen would be more to the point.
>

> Again, I think you're missing the point. You assume that people who
> write this stuff want to help solve real-world problems: they don't,
> they want to have academic careers and impress people at dinner
> parties.
>
> --tim

Another urban legend and folk myth is that there is out there a sort of
Georgtown or Cambridge "set" of liberal elitists who have dinner and/or
cocktail parties, drinking Pink Ladies and partaking of other tutti-
frutti delights. In actual fact and in my direct experience, including
five years at Princeton University, there's not so much "impressing
people at dinner parties" as there is hard work in academia.

An academic careerist is a fool simply because of the low demand for
most scholars in most fields. Today, he or she has to have some
dedication to the very idea that learning for its own sake is valuable
and rewarding. This of course attracts the resentment of the sullen
corporate types who long ago cut off their nuts for a paycheck, whence
these folk tales.

spino...@my-deja.com

unread,

Dec 4, 2000, 9:00:58 PM12/4/00

In article <x7bsust...@hana.snafu.org>,

Marco S Hyman <ma...@snafu.org> wrote:

I've of course read Strunk and White, that totem, long ago: but I have
also read Richard Lanham's 1974 comments on Strunk and White which
place this manual in historical context.

Strunk and White were writing about the needs of private magazines (in
their case the New Yorker of Harold Ross) in which the real financial
cheesecake is not the articles but the ads. Essentially, their mission
at the time (which was rather long ago) was to eliminate the long
articles that actual readers demanded in the 19th century, in favor of
snappier content that people in the 1920s and 1930s demanded.

Their financial mission, as far as Harold Ross was concerned in the
Depression, was to ensure that the magazine stayed afloat. This
required some "labor discipline" on the part of the authors, and
editing out their favorite parts, while sometimes necessary, also
conveniently sent the message that they did not own the printing press.

The trend of actual demand DID move towards simpler content over the
period 1930..2000: however, by the 1980s, it became moronizing, as in
USA Today, where the simplicity of the style destroys content
altogether. At the New Yorker, Tina Brown continued the simplifying
and moronizing trend until the magazine was abandoned by its natural
constituency who although time-challenged still wanted a reasonable
level of complexity in the articles and after Brown got her cute little
butt booted out of the New Yorker, its articles have once again gotten
longer and more interesting.

Strunk and White is out of date in a multicultural world, as Lanham
pointed out some time ago. Thus I am offended by their favoring of
Anglo Saxon words as against words of Norman-French derivation: for
this discounts my high school Latin and somewhat discriminates against
my Catholic culture. I can well imagine that they give higher offense
to Latino and black students who would write well were it not for the
minatory use of an outdated guide.

So you can take your Strunk and White and shove it up your ass (and how
is that for simple, manly, Anglo-Saxon style?) Lanham points out that

the best way to learn to write is to read, and the real problem in
teaching writing (as I have) is that students don't read. I'd add that
my academic experience is that by today, TEACHERS don't read (Saul
Bellow asked a fellow faculty member at the University of Chicago how
he liked the new library: the teacher replied that he wouldn't know
since he did not read outside journals in his field.) As a result,
students in writing classes are frequently abused with Strunk and White
by teachers who hate the written word, and would be rather watching TV
themselves.
>
> // marc

spino...@my-deja.com

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Dec 4, 2000, 9:20:24 PM12/4/00

In article <t2mj8n...@corp.supernews.com>,

You just don't get the reality of power in our business, do you, Al?
No, I didn't want to get the reputation within my company as being
critical of software engineering since along with my wife I was
responsible for their support.

Many programmers who questioned software engineering are driving cabs
because they were forced out of the business.

Now that my kids are grown, I feel freer to express these views. I've
also found that being a yes-man and an empty suit doesn't really work
either. Finally, in the present economy (which may of course bust at
any time) my skills are in such demand I can say what I feel.

Your resentment of my manner of expression is part of the problem, Al,
and in my original review I did mention how the anti-intellectualism of
the average programmer is used to ensure that management is always in
control. It's actually Bertolt Brecht's "culture is dogshit" mistake
(if we can consider programming a form of culture.) Brecht rejected
high culture because it was alien to the worker, who wanted football
and beer. Brecht failed to see how football and beer were themselves
commodities and could themselves control the worker.

The real revolutionary wears a suit and tie, like Malcolm X, and, like
Malcolm, calls on his followers to act with the same dignity as the
ruling elite. My claim is that the high-tone talk of "science" in
software engineering needs to be met, not with inchoate muttering and
drooling, but with even higher-toned analysis of its cultural and
scientific origins.

Here's an example. Suppose you are asked to write a report by your
manager and the manager tells you it is too long, and quotes Polonius'
speech in Hamlet, where Polonius admonishes Laertes not to use too many
words. It is a common management technique in engineering, for the
manager to show that he has more humanities cultural depth: women
managers are especially fond of this.

But if you actually read Shakespeare (or rent Ken Branagh's excellent
movies) you can come right back with the fact that we need not take
Polunius' advice, for it's obvious Shakespeare thought Polonius was a
damnfool, and Polonius, in a later scene with Gertrude, himself is
overly prolix. Shakespeare, who used far more words than the average
playwright of his time, had no brief for terseness for its own sake.

The very fact, that I pointed out in the first paragraph of my review,
that for years these "programmers BAD: software engineering GOOD" tomes
have been written without any real change, shows that programmers with
disquiet about this power/knowledge need to be something more than
unreconstructed, aging hippies about it. Their very culture keeps them
where they are. It is informed by an unexamined 1960s cynicism about
culture and a skepticism about the possibility of knowledge that is all
too ready to say that software engineering is dogshit...but plays along
nonetheless, reproducing the real dogshit year after year.

>
> /Al

spino...@my-deja.com

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Dec 4, 2000, 9:44:27 PM12/4/00

In article <3A2B6F01...@antlimited.com>,
Richard Heathfield <ric...@antlimited.com> wrote:

> spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
> >
> > In article <90f597$o4a$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>,
> > naisbodo <nais...@enteract.com> wrote:>
> > Ironically, we all accept this as regards science and
> > mathematics
>
> Simple examples of complex thought which can be expressed simply:
>
> F = ma (from Newtonian mechanics)
> E = mcc (from relativity theory - sorry for the absence of
> subscripts...)

This is a nonsensical example, for anyone who knows only that f=ma or
even the words "force equals mass times acceleration" or "energy equals
the speed of light squared times mass" knows neither general relativity
nor Newtonian mechanics AT ALL.

This is like the manager who writes down phrases in a meeting and
passes them along as knowledge to programmers, without finding what the
phrases mean.

> >
> > Shakespeare's plays often express complex thoughts about personality
> > and human relationships, and his vocabulary was large and likewise
his
> > sentence structure.
>
> Sure. So?

So gee Shakespeare should knew how to write, huh?

>
> >
> > Your "simplicity" is a psychological, reader-response predicate
which
> > is an attribute of the reader's reception.
>
> How do you know that? Perhaps his simplicity is just simple.
>
> Defining simplicity is actually an alarmingly complex activity!
>

Yes.

> <snip>
>
> > For if you reduce the word count by allowing what you call big words
> > and what I call terms of art, the writer is under the charge of
using
> > big words and terms of art. If you prohibit the big words, the
writer
> > is charged with verbosity. His thoughts (including his desire for
> > charity and nuance) are at times conveniently silenced.
>
> There's a place to use big words, and that place is in a forum and
> context where everyone likely to read or hear those words is likely to
> garner your intended meaning, and where communication is more
effective
> because of the bigness of the words.
>

I do not so much use big words as sentence structure, in a forum where
the majority of writers prefer telescoped sentence structure. The
humorist Dave Barry noticed long ago that the Internet is a guy
phenomenon, and guys think it prissy to use complex sentence
structures. They prefer the directness of Indian Companion in the
prologue to South Park:

"Someone coming." - Indian Companion

But the real arrogance is not to use either big words or sentence
structure: it is instead to say, as so many guys in this thread have
said in different ways, "Ho, me Normal Person and me no like your big
words and forked tongue, for it is better to be simple and to eat bread
and salt and speak truth."

[I do not want to give offense here to Native Americans, so I switched
to a Russian proverb. I'll also point out that Native Americans are
caricatured by the "silent Indian" image and there is a wealth of
stories and songs from Native Americans. I am talking about the
cultural baggage of Internet honchos.]

It is arrogant because you define the audience. Nothing gives you that
right.

> There's a place to use little words, and that place is in a forum and

> context where the bigger words would confuse a significant proportion
of
> your audience or readership. In this case, the forum is
> comp.programming, a technical discussion newsgroup (always re-read
> before posting! - I note that this is cross-posted to two newsgroups
> with which I am unfamiliar, alt.folklore.computers and comp.software-
eng
> - so I don't know whether my point is valid in those newsgroups), but
> the context has little or nothing to do with the technical side of
> programming. Therefore, leaving topicality issues aside for the
moment,
> little words are appropriate. Those big words which don't enjoy wide
> understanding within the programming community which this newsgroup
(or
> these newsgroups!) represents should either be defined as you go or
> eschewed (rejected) altogether.
>

Actually, I was trying to get to comp.programming but it appears I have
been waylaid by an eternal discussion of writing style. The real
violation of the charter of comp.programming was to raise the issue of
my writing style in the first place.

However, writing style does have a lot to do with programming: this was
first noticed in the 1970s by Brian Kernighan. Basically, programming
tends to press some of the same cultural buttons, and to cause the same
resentments, as does writing. Many programmers actually hate "clean",
elegant code because it is a cultural reproof to their self-perceived
lack of ability, and their unspoken anxieties about whether they really
belong in the programming racket at all.

>
> Not really. It's possible to call a spade a manually operated
> agricultural excavation implement, and it's possible to summarise the
> complex behaviour of a body in a gravitational field with a simple
> equation. Therefore, examples exist which show that it is possible for
> complexity of expression to be unrelated to complexity of thought, and
> therefore they are separate measures. Therefore, he is correct.
>

But you CANNOT meaningfully say you are not wasting the audience's time
when you merely precis the complex behavior by stating the final
formula. You have to bring the audience up to speed. Likewise, when
I've talkked about cultural theory, I have at least tried to explain
whatinhell Foucault was talking about, whence the "verbosity."

> >
> > For in no final sense can we speak of "measuring complexity"
although
> > software engineers talk as if this is a given. Thought precedes
> > numeration and therefore to measure complexity is deep nonsense.
>
> To measure complexity objectively is difficult, if not impossible. To
> measure it heuristically and subjectively is something most people
> reading this newsgroup will do on most days. Hardly nonsense.
>

They think they are measuring because they are geeks who think that
measuring, as opposed to logical analysis, is the first act of
cognition. In reality, they are having an emotional meltdown because I
make it plain that cultural forces are arrayed against them.

> >
> > This was seen in the early days of software engineering when lines
of
> > code were used as a metric.
>
> It was not foolish to seek to measure software complexity. It is
foolish
> to use lines of code as your sole metric. We "know" intuitively that a
> 10,000,000 line program is more complex than a 10 line program. What
we
> can't know is that a 2,000 line program is more complex than a 1,000
> line program.
>

You should check out some of the one-liners in the Obfuscated C
Contest. There are examples that are far more complex than a program
like:

i = i + 1 {repeated 10,000,000 times)

Size of code is an IRREVELANT measure.

Bite me. I know a little Latin, and if you think for one fucking

minute I am going to take the votes of thousands of mental defectives

you've got another thing coming. "um" is NOT the correct ending.

>
> > is not a rhetorical
> > tactic, it is a valid logical method.
>
> Indeed it is. It is also a rhetorical tactic.
>

Only in the trivial sense that we use logic when we use rhetoric. The
ordinary meaning of rhetoric refers to nonlogical moves such as appeal
to emotions. Reductio does nothing of the sort.

This shows little enough respect for ability to learn.

Natarajan Krishnaswami

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Dec 4, 2000, 10:20:34 PM12/4/00

On Tue, 05 Dec 2000 02:44:27 GMT, spino...@my-deja.com <spino...@my-deja.com> wrote:
> Bite me. I know a little Latin, and if you think for one fucking
> minute I am going to take the votes of thousands of mental defectives
> you've got another thing coming. "um" is NOT the correct ending.

Sorry, -um really is the correct ending: 'absurdam' is the accusative
(object of 'ad') of (feminine) 'absurda', whereas the phrase needs the
accusative form of (neuter) 'absurdum', which is 'absurdum'.

If you're going to be a pedant, at least be right.

<N/>

naisbodo

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Dec 4, 2000, 11:07:49 PM12/4/00

In comp.programming Natarajan Krishnaswami <nx...@po.cwru.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, 05 Dec 2000 02:44:27 GMT, spino...@my-deja.com <spino...@my-deja.com> wrote:
>> Bite me. I know a little Latin, and if you think for one fucking
>> minute I am going to take the votes of thousands of mental defectives
>> you've got another thing coming. "um" is NOT the correct ending.
>
> Sorry, -um really is the correct ending: 'absurdam' is the accusative
> (object of 'ad') of (feminine) 'absurda', whereas the phrase needs the
> accusative form of (neuter) 'absurdum', which is 'absurdum'.

Yah. Sorry I ever brought the phrase up in the first place--I haven't
studied Latin that much, it was only something I learned when I studied
logic. I didn't realize this was going to turn into a spelling-flame-
pissing match intended to prove that Spinoza's superiority compared to
the rest of the world.

But then, that's all this thread was from the beginning, sans spelling
flame, and I apologize for having drawn out the initial discussion in
vain. Apologies also to alt.folklore.computers and comp.software-eng,
which undoubtedly have been as irritated by this thread as the group in
which I am reading it.

(My previous message would have been my last, but I felt I owed the
above groups an apology for contributing to the length of this thread.)

Jay Maynard

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Dec 4, 2000, 11:27:01 PM12/4/00

On 5 Dec 2000 04:07:49 GMT, naisbodo <nais...@enteract.com> wrote:
>Apologies also to alt.folklore.computers and comp.software-eng,
>which undoubtedly have been as irritated by this thread as the group in
>which I am reading it.

I've been wondering just what the precise hell this whole subject has been
doing in afc, where I read it...but then, given spinoza9999's overwhelming
sense of moral and intellectual superiority, I'm sure he'll argue that he's
got the right - nay, the duty - to let us all know about his crusade,
whether we're interested in hearing about it or not.

spino...@my-deja.com

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Dec 5, 2000, 12:11:53 AM12/5/00

In article <x7wvdfs...@hana.snafu.org>,

Marco S Hyman <ma...@snafu.org> wrote:
> spino...@my-deja.com writes:
>
> > So you can take your Strunk and White and shove it up your ass (and
how
> > is that for simple, manly, Anglo-Saxon style?) Lanham points out
that
>

> Short, simple, and to-the-point. Too bad you didn't start your
> little essay with this comment. It would have placed the remainder
> of your thoughts in their proper context.

Indeed, but note that thereby I become a sound byte and a cartoon
troll. I ain't no fucking sound byte and I ain't no cartoon troll.

Note how in Steve's book he marginalizes the opposition to
certification, by quoting the bandidos in John Huston's film The
Treasure of the Sierra Madre:

Badges? We don' need no badges. We don' need no stinking badges!

Steve does so in a fashion that is both racist and colonialist, for
Huston's film portrayed Mexico as a land of bandidos, and Federales
scarcely distinguishable from bandidos. Since this autumn, Mexico has
managed to elect a Presidente and we have not, it is understandable
that Mexicans might resent caricature.

It is also likely that educated people with degrees, who have not
passed certification tests, might resent being internally colonized and
lumped with thieves as well.

spino...@my-deja.com

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Dec 5, 2000, 12:29:30 AM12/5/00

In article <t2mk6e2...@corp.supernews.com>,

"Al Dunbar" <Al_D...@HoTMaiL.com> wrote:>
> > I'd suggest, Al, that reading some of the texts might help your
case,
> > and that part of my verbosity is simply a density of references.
>
> Exactly. It is as if you cannot speak directly on your own, but need
to
> constantly make references to various philosophers and others in the

> mistaken belief that this will impress the fight out of the
opposition.

Al, referring to previous work is simple common courtesy to the author,
and I went into this knowing full well that programmers of my
generation and younger are singularly unimpressed by references to
works they do not think they have time to read. Note that the goal is
a sort of war of the buffoons, in which subordinated intellectuals of
the dominant class enforce their internal pecking order by attacking
praxis (referring to previous work) which is expected in published
work.

One is instead to engage in content-free rumination, New Age horseshit,
and flaming easy targets (such as H1-Bs, as in alt-computer-
consultants.) That keeps things safely virtual.

Solipsistic talk inspired by recovery groups is encouraged in which the
poster presents himself as a misunderstood and lonely cuddly-bear with
feelings that cannot be gainsaid. Or, equally solipsistic talk,
informed by hatred, is welcome because again even negative feelings
cannot be gainsaid...in a society in which people insist that prisoners
be executed because it is part of their "recovery process."

What appears to be pretentious and completely out of the question, like
farting in church, is the claim of knowledge. References are checkable
and thus a false reference would be a stupid move. Nonetheless, in an
Internet dominated by the feelings of overworked garden gnomes who do
not have time to read anything outside their field, references are
nothing more than pretense.

You haven't bothered, I note, to check up on Gilb, or for that matter
even read Steve McConnell's book. Instead you restrict yourself to a
critique of writing style when I have made it clear that the medium is
the message. You've also encouraged less principled posters to flame
away (based on the little boy's law, that any uniqueness is to be
badgered by the mob) thus trivializing what remains an important
issue.

spino...@my-deja.com

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Dec 5, 2000, 12:32:55 AM12/5/00

In article <t2mh2ga...@corp.supernews.com>,

"Al Dunbar" <Al_D...@HoTMaiL.com> wrote:
>
> <spino...@my-deja.com> wrote in message

> news:90eu74$v64$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
> > In article <x7d7f93...@hana.snafu.org>,

> > Marco S Hyman <ma...@snafu.org> wrote:
> > > spino...@my-deja.com writes:
> > >
>

> <snip>

>
> > This is possibly the major reason why I remain "verbose."
>

> I thought you remained verbose in order to disprove our assertion
that you
> were verbose, a statement that you took exception to some posts ago.

For probably the last time, let me spell it out for you in simple terms.

You haven't read the book in question (apparently.)

Therefore you were *prima facie* unqualified to start a discussion.

Nonetheless you jumped in with a (layperson's) critique of writing
style, wasted my time, and ignited a flame war as other posters saw
their chance to join a small herd, teasing and otherwise badgering a
poster whose style differed from the half-literate norm.

Shame on you.
>
> /Al
>
> > > // marc

Steve Merrick

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Dec 5, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/5/00

What's the war about? Someone contributed a review of a book. Whether
you liked the review or not, it couldn't *decrease* what you know of the
book, so how could it harm you? If you didn't like the review, why not
just ignore it? All I can see is a group of people feeling threatened,
and blustering accordingly. It's time to back away from this silliness
before it turns into a fight.

I enjoyed the review. Thank you.

--
Steve Merrick

Richard Heathfield

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Dec 5, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/5/00

[My last article in this thread]

spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> In article <3A2B6F01...@antlimited.com>,
> Richard Heathfield <ric...@antlimited.com> wrote:
> > spino...@my-deja.com wrote:
> > >
> > > In article <90f597$o4a$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>,
> > > naisbodo <nais...@enteract.com> wrote:>
> > > Ironically, we all accept this as regards science and
> > > mathematics
> >
> > Simple examples of complex thought which can be expressed simply:
> >
> > F = ma (from Newtonian mechanics)
> > E = mcc (from relativity theory - sorry for the absence of
> > subscripts...)
>
> This is a nonsensical example,

No, it isn't.

> for anyone who knows only that f=ma or
> even the words "force equals mass times acceleration" or "energy equals
> the speed of light squared times mass" knows neither general relativity
> nor Newtonian mechanics AT ALL.

Very true, but the example is not nonsensical because it demonstrates
how complex ideas can be expressed simply, which was the point. I did
not and do not claim that these expressions suffice for a full
understanding of the entire subjects in which they are relevant.

Read for comprehension, sir.

>
> This is like the manager who writes down phrases in a meeting and
> passes them along as knowledge to programmers, without finding what the
> phrases mean.

No, it's more like programmers being able to communicate complex ideas
in conversations like:

"What's the best way to store these IPs? Tree or hash?"
"Use a hash - quicker, less RAM".

Complex ideas, simple expression.

Read for comprehension, sir.

>
> > >
> > > Shakespeare's plays often express complex thoughts about personality
> > > and human relationships, and his vocabulary was large and likewise
> his
> > > sentence structure.
> >
> > Sure. So?
>
> So gee Shakespeare should knew how to write, huh?

^^^^

Mr Spelling-Bee, huh?

Citing one example of a playwright who expresses some complex ideas in
complex ways does not prove that all complex ideas must be expressed in
complex ways.

Read for comprehension, sir.

<snip>

> >
> > There's a place to use big words, and that place is in a forum and
> > context where everyone likely to read or hear those words is likely to
> > garner your intended meaning, and where communication is more
> effective
> > because of the bigness of the words.
> >
> I do not so much use big words as sentence structure, in a forum where
> the majority of writers prefer telescoped sentence structure.

This is indeed true (although some people might reasonably claim that
you /also/ use big words), but it is irrelevant.

> The
> humorist Dave Barry noticed long ago that the Internet is a guy
> phenomenon, and guys think it prissy to use complex sentence
> structures.

I am perfectly prepared to read, and indeed to use, complex sentence
structures, when I consider them to be necessary and appropriate to the
point I am making, and likely to be comprehensible to my intended
readership. If I am writing for a readership which is not experienced in
the use of technical jargon, I either won't use any or will define the
terms I use as I use them. When one is addressing technical newsgroups
such as the ones to which you posted your article, one cannot sensibly
assume that one's intended readership is fully conversant with the
meanings of words like "epistemological". Thus, if one needs to use such
a word, one ought to define it.

I fail to see the relevance of Dave Barry, or his observation, to this
discussion, since the generalisation he makes, like all generalisations
(including this one), is false.

<snip>

> But the real arrogance is not to use either big words or sentence
> structure: it is instead to say, as so many guys in this thread have
> said in different ways, "Ho, me Normal Person and me no like your big
> words and forked tongue, for it is better to be simple and to eat bread
> and salt and speak truth."

It depends on your intention. If you're seeking to impress, use big
words and damn the consequences (such as this overly-long thread). If
you're seeking to inform, consider your audience.

It strikes me that you're far more interested in impressing people than
with informing them, and that you have failed on both counts.

>
> [I do not want to give offense here to Native Americans,

You gave it your best shot, though, didn't you?

> so I switched
> to a Russian proverb.

Going for the double-whammy?

> I'll also point out that Native Americans are
> caricatured by the "silent Indian" image and there is a wealth of
> stories and songs from Native Americans.

What on Earth has this to do with what we're discussing?

> I am talking about the
> cultural baggage of Internet honchos.]

a) this is Usenet, not the Internet. Usenet can use the Internet, but
does not have to.
b) You appear to be making the mistake that many Usenetters do, of
assuming that everyone in the world is an American, with American
cultural norms, values, and referents. For example, I'm not entirely
clear what you mean by a "honcho".

> It is arrogant because you define the audience. Nothing gives you that
> right.

I don't define the audience of comp.software-eng, comp.programming, or
alt.folklore.computers. The topic defines the audience in each of those
newsgroups.

> Actually, I was trying to get to comp.programming but it appears I have
> been waylaid by an eternal discussion of writing style. The real
> violation of the charter of comp.programming was to raise the issue of
> my writing style in the first place.

Write for comprehension, sir. Very few people had a clue what you were
talking about. I've just re-read your original article, and I have to
say I found it a hilarious exercise. Did you really think that the
majority of your selected readership would be able to understand, or
care about, most of what you wrote?

> However, writing style does have a lot to do with programming: this was
> first noticed in the 1970s by Brian Kernighan. Basically, programming
> tends to press some of the same cultural buttons,

I have no idea what you mean by "cultural button". I'm picturing a large
coat-button visiting an art gallery, which obviously isn't what you
meant.

> and to cause the same
> resentments, as does writing. Many programmers actually hate "clean",
> elegant code

I don't know of a single programmer who hates clean, elegant code. You
obviously mix in different circles to me.

> because it is a cultural reproof to their self-perceived
> lack of ability,

I also don't know any programmers with a self-perceived lack of ability.
The opposite problem is more usually the case.

> and their unspoken anxieties about whether they really
> belong in the programming racket at all.

If they are unspoken, how can you know that these anxieties exist?

> > It's possible to call a spade a manually operated
> > agricultural excavation implement, and it's possible to summarise the
> > complex behaviour of a body in a gravitational field with a simple
> > equation. Therefore, examples exist which show that it is possible for
> > complexity of expression to be unrelated to complexity of thought, and
> > therefore they are separate measures. Therefore, he is correct.
> >
>
> But you CANNOT meaningfully say you are not wasting the audience's time
> when you merely precis the complex behavior by stating the final
> formula.

My dear chap, the proposition was that complex ideas cannot be expressed
simply, and I have defeated it. I have not said that all complex ideas
can be expressed simply, and I have not said that an entire scientific
discipline or even sub-discipline can be summed up in one equation. I
have merely pointed out that equations are a good way to express complex
ideas simply, thus defeating your proposition.

Read for comprehension, sir.

> You have to bring the audience up to speed.

Sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't. When I suggest to a fellow
programmer that he might consider using a deque as an appropriate
solution to his problem, I can confidently expect that he will know what
I mean, and if he's unfortunate enough not to have met the term, he can
ask for clarification, which can be given in a few words - "it's a
double-ended queue - you can add and remove from either end". I don't
have to spend huge amounts of time explaining the concept, because he
already has a good understanding of the field.

When you are trying to explain something foreign to your selected
readership's experience, however, you do need to spend a lot more time
bringing them up to speed.

> Likewise, when
> I've talkked about cultural theory, I have at least tried to explain
> whatinhell Foucault was talking about, whence the "verbosity."

Just out of sheer curiosity, what led you to believe that your article
would be of interest to the newsgroups you selected?

>
> > >
> > > For in no final sense can we speak of "measuring complexity"
> although
> > > software engineers talk as if this is a given. Thought precedes
> > > numeration and therefore to measure complexity is deep nonsense.
> >
> > To measure complexity objectively is difficult, if not impossible. To
> > measure it heuristically and subjectively is something most people
> > reading this newsgroup will do on most days. Hardly nonsense.
> >
> They think they are measuring because they are geeks

Ah, you'll have to define "geek", I'm afraid.

> who think that
> measuring, as opposed to logical analysis, is the first act of
> cognition.

I know of nobody else who thinks this. I'm beginning to wonder whether
we are from the same planet.

> In reality, they are having an emotional meltdown because I
> make it plain that cultural forces are arrayed against them.

No, they're having great fun flaming you because you're arrogant,
pretentious, wordy, and a poor judge of your readership.

> > > This was seen in the early days of software engineering when lines
> of
> > > code were used as a metric.
> >
> > It was not foolish to seek to measure software complexity. It is
> foolish
> > to use lines of code as your sole metric. We "know" intuitively that a
> > 10,000,000 line program is more complex than a 10 line program. What
> we
> > can't know is that a 2,000 line program is more complex than a 1,000
> > line program.
> >
> You should check out some of the one-liners in the Obfuscated C
> Contest. There are examples that are far more complex than a program
> like:
>
> i = i + 1 {repeated 10,000,000 times)

So, like I said, we "know" intuitively that a 10 MLOC program is more
complex than a 10 line program, but we cannot know that a 2 KLOC program
is more complex than a 1 KLOC program. The second half of the sentence
indicates that counter-examples can exist; you have pointed out another
counter-example - big deal. Nevertheless, in general terms, big programs
tend to be more complicated than little programs.

>
> Size of code is an IRREVELANT measure.

No, it's not. It's a heuristic, and a useful one. That's not to say that
it's solid enough to base, say, remuneration on (and, indeed, if you
did, you'd end up with your program where i++ is repeated 10,000,000
times, human nature being what it is), but it's one indicator of
complexity. It can't be used alone, and it may not even be a major
indicator, but it is certainly one of the things one takes into account
when looking at code complexity.

>
> > > "Measuring complexity" is reification for it makes a thing out of a
> > > concept which exists primarily in a network of concepts. It also
> > > allows the measurer's personal bias to be presented as Science.
> >
> > Measuring complexity is something we do every day. The fact that we
> > can't measure it with a ruler or a balance is neither here nor there -
> > we make heuristic judgements of complexity regularly. Sometimes,
> > therefore, we make wrong judgements. But we get it right often enough
> > that we consider it worth continuing to do.

I've left this bit in, even though you didn't reply to it, because I
think you should have replied to it It is a direct rebuttal of what you
said, so I'd be interested to hear your reaction to it.

> > > > Second, you're using the rhetorical tactic of reducto ad absurdum
> in
> > > > your examples:
> > >
> > > "Reductio ad absurdam" (the correct spelling)
> >

> >
> > So, your spelling is more popular than naisbodo's, but considerably
> less
> > popular than mine. That doesn't mean you're wrong, but it does mean
> you
> > need to defend your accusation with a reference to an independent
> > authority on the Latin language who supports your view, or withdraw
> the
> > accusation altogether.
>
> Bite me. I know a little Latin

So do I. If you're going to correct people's spelling, get the spelling
right yourself.

At present, your assertion that you are correct is just that - an
assertion. It has no more validity than mine. If you want to pick holes
in people's spelling, a most unUsenettish thing to do (except in revenge
for having it done), you'd better be able to prove that your correction
is correct, and proof requires more than assertion.

Indeed, it was your incorrect correction of naisbodo's spelling which
prompted me to send my original reply.

>, and if you think for one fucking
> minute I am going to take the votes of thousands of mental defectives

Ah, how revealing. This is how you talk, and how you view your fellow
Netizens, when you've forgotten you're supposed to be intellectual, is
it?

> you've got another thing coming.

ITYM "think". If you criticise other people's spelling, be damn sure
your own is correct.

> "um" is NOT the correct ending.

Your assertion is meaningless without independent and authoritative
evidence.

> > > is not a rhetorical
> > > tactic, it is a valid logical method.
> >
> > Indeed it is. It is also a rhetorical tactic.
> >
> Only in the trivial sense that we use logic when we use rhetoric. The
> ordinary meaning of rhetoric refers to nonlogical moves such as appeal
> to emotions. Reductio does nothing of the sort.

If reductio ad absurdum were not a rhetorical tactic, it could not be
used rhetorically.

I am using it rhetorically.

Therefore, it is a rhetorical tactic.

[The Fascism bit]

> >
> > The problem here is that most people reading this newsgroup (I am
> > replying in comp.programming) are likely to have formed their
> > understanding of Fascism either from Spielberg's movies or from
> > poorly-remembered history lessons. They don't view it in the same
> > precise way that you do, and (as you pointed out) the word has become
> > highly emotive rather than descriptive. This can impede understanding.
> >
> This shows little enough respect for ability to learn.

I'd have thought it showed a healthy respect for people's ability to
select newsgroups and academic subjects in which they are interested.
Fascism (in the strictly accurate sense of that word) is not a topic
which one goes looking for in programming newsgroups; those in your
audience who don't know what Fascism really is (and I'll bet it's most
of them) /don't care/ what Fascism really is; otherwise, they'd have
gone and found out. Those few who do care either will go and find out
now, or have already found out and therefore already know.

Read for comprehension, sir. Read for comprehension.

Jeff York

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Dec 5, 2000, 3:00:00 AM12/5/00