As a matter of interest
Francis Glassborow
or reading the thread started by spinoza1111 might get some insights
into his condition if they google that name (I only did so to see if I
could find the name of the human being hiding behind that pseudonym.
--
comp.lang.c.moderated - moderation address: cl...@plethora.net -- you must
have an appropriate newsgroups line in your header for your mail to be seen,
or the newsgroup name in square brackets in the subject line. Sorry.
Seebs
> I know this is off topic but I think those other either contributing to
> or reading the thread started by spinoza1111 might get some insights
> into his condition if they google that name (I only did so to see if I
> could find the name of the human being hiding behind that pseudonym.
He at least sometimes claims to be "Edward G. Nilges"; at least, that was
the name signed on the first post, I believe.
I don't think it's entirely offtopic. It's pretty close, maybe, but... To
some extent, usenet groups (when they're worth reading) function as
communities, with interest in the group's topic being most of the membership
criteria. Active members may be topical in and of themselves; for that
matter, if someone is posting at great length on a topic, the background
may become relevant.
In this case, we have someone with deeply-felt convictions about C who is
unable to articulate much in the way of argumentation, leaving it up to us
to figure out what he might be getting at, or what his arguments would be
if he were able to present any. So I consider it topical enough, in that
it's a substantive contribution to communication about the topic. Since
readers are unlikely to get information about his objections to criticisms
of Schildt from asking him questions or reading his posts, I don't see much
else they can do if they want to understand his perceptions.
-s
--
Copyright 2009, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet...@seebs.net
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
spinoza1111
> On 2009-09-13, Francis Glassborow <francis.glassbo...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>
> > I know this is off topic but I think those other either contributing to
> > or reading the thread started by spinoza1111 might get some insights
> > into his condition if they google that name (I only did so to see if I
> > could find the name of the human being hiding behind that pseudonym.
>
> the name signed on the first post, I believe.
I am spinoza1111, and I am Edward G. Nilges. I'm the author of an
Apress title, "Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler" (Apress
2004).
>
> I don't think it's entirely offtopic. It's pretty close, maybe, but... To
> some extent, usenet groups (when they're worth reading) function as
> communities, with interest in the group's topic being most of the membership
> criteria. Active members may be topical in and of themselves; for that
> matter, if someone is posting at great length on a topic, the background
> may become relevant.
I agree, but NOT to the extent that trashing him becomes the topic du
jour. Your writings, Peter, have made Herb Schildt's defects the
topic, and this was an inappropriate and unethical use of these
newsgroups.
>
> In this case, we have someone with deeply-felt convictions about C who is
> unable to articulate much in the way of argumentation, leaving it up to us
I'm afraid, Peter, that this claim is what people learn to make when:
(1) They have fancy degrees but received those degrees since about
1970, at which time students were permitted, especially at prestige
universities, to skip survey courses in history and literature, and
satisfy these requirements with inappropriately narrow classes such as
"French Movies" or "Poetry for Physics Majors".
(2) They are in their careers exposed to multi-level texts, especially
from subaltern sources.
They then fall back on wordage learned in what few English classes
they've been required to take, and most of what they recall is the
tautological admonition to construct a "good" argument, along with
references to simplicity of English a good thing...and stuff.
They thus construct thinly abstract counterarguments which rapidly
become simple ad hominem since they imply, through abstraction and
lack of any depth, such global faults in their interlocutor that if he
has any balls whatsoever, he'll come back with stronger arguments of
greater depth, interspersed with invitations to you, to go jump in the
lake or to commit a variety of unnatural acts.
You will then be primly aghast since education in your case has
primarily unmanned you, being a continuation in many ways of *Kinder
Garten*, and will respond by describing your opponent to third parties
as a *monstrum horrendum*, *hostes omnium gentium*, a *trollus
trollificarum maleficarum*, etc., where I should mention that the
first two tags are genuine Latin and the third is circus or fantasy
Latin so as to prevent Latin flames.
You then descend to what you imagine to be your shadowy opponent's
level by making a joke of his patronym, at which point he replies even
more briskly.
Fortunately for all of us, these flame festivals never end with the
code duello, not even blunderbusses and balloons at dawn. However,
there are very serious matters involved and your conduct may yet wind
you up in a court of law. I'd advise you to grow up, and I encourage
the signs in these debates that you are learning from this experience.
There are some green shoots, your conduct as moderator being one.
> to figure out what he might be getting at, or what his arguments would be
> if he were able to present any. So I consider it topical enough, in that
If I presented zero arguments, it would not be hard to figure them
out, would it?
> it's a substantive contribution to communication about the topic. Since
> readers are unlikely to get information about his objections to criticisms
> of Schildt from asking him questions or reading his posts, I don't see much
> else they can do if they want to understand his perceptions.
Gee, that's a tough one. Why don't you conduct a seminar in what
Nilges is trying to say? Form a reading group?
I am willing to answer all questions, but my case is very simple. Read
Stanley Fish if you don't understand the idea of "discourse
communities".
It would be perfectly appropriate to criticise a comp sci professor if
he made errors about comp sci in writing a textbook: for example, if
he claimed (as many people claim here) that "the stack is not
important". That's because part of comp sci as engineering is an
accurate record of solutions that have been used successfully.
But if a textbook author makes a mistake, such as saying the Franklin
Roosevelt dropped the bomb on Japan, you don't assign the book in
history class, and, at worst, you complain to the publisher. You don't
make personal attacks on the textbook company employee or
subcontractor for the very good reason that employees are in the US
and other legal systems held harmless from many errors (not all) when
those errors do not materially effect the public safety and interest.
Herb, like me, was something of the Author but also the Employee, and
you failed to understand this in a charitable fashion.
In the case of Schildt's books, the problem was that McGraw Hill as a
corporation shifted from producing academically respectable books such
as "Computer Structures: Readings and Examples" in 1971 to SAMS-like
books because its marketing people thought this a good direction. They
didn't have Tim O'Reilly's or Gary Cornell's insights that computer
books to be saleable on a longer time frame needed to be more
convergent and not less convergent with academic work while still
staying in the applied space (O'Reilly invented the O'Reilly series of
animal books about compsci: Gary et al. founded Apress).
Herb was therefore directed as a virtual employee of McGraw Hill to
write a certain kind of book using a certain amount of resources, not
to enter the academic discourse of cutting-edge compsci, and he did a
great job as an author/employee.
The errors in his books appear in very many computer books at all
levels, and they are regrettable but not any more pervasive in his
books: you've magnified them beyond all reason because you had neither
the courage or vision to do actual sociology, or ask why software
correctness is apparently unattainable.
Now, in "The Elements of Programming Style" in 1976, a young Brian
Kernighan expressed shock that buggy code could be printed in computer
books. I spoke to him about this in 1986, asking if he'd offended
anyone, and he said that the authors he mentioned had thanked him.
But I think Brian missed something. The volume of code in a computer
book, and the fact that as ink on paper produced somewhere at a plant
in China or South Dakota, from camera ready PDF files, does not
exactly leap off the paper and run on your computer, means a nonzero
probability of error, and the error rate would have to be considerably
higher than Schildt's to indicate malfeasance.
That's why I kept code examples at a minimum in Build Your Own .Net
Language and Compiler: the user can go to Apress and download 26000
lines of well-formatted and readable code which works on the examples
described but may have aporias. For example, when you compile it with
today's .Net VB, you get tons of warnings because the latest release
requires, at the warning level, the programmer to assign a default
value to Dimmed variables (all variables).
No intelligent person expects this printed code to work without
testing and often modification for his system, and the very testing
and modification is a valuable form of READING from which people
learn. Homeric nods themselves can be learning experiences.
To make the above argument a slippery slope to a universal license is
merely, in my view, to confuse writing computer books with the utterly
irresponsible and vicious worlds in which many of Herb's critics work,
where the error rate is much higher but the corporation doesn't care.
Today, I teach English, and in teaching Shakespeare I show how Job One
in Shakespeare editing is determining and respecting authorial intent.
I display the First Folio online and I show how the fuzzy and bouncey
text set by Hemings and Condell's printers devils becomes a modern
text by way of reasoning about the author's intent.
[No, I don't have an English PhD and no, I do not teach at a
university. I teach it in a healthy private sector which supports
students at their main school in which the customer is king.]
Reading a book involves respecting the author at some level. It is NOT
scanning a text finding errors as Peter Seebach seems to have done
circa 1995, for money, whilst himself constructing a disorganized
text, which provides no insight because it makes claims too negatively
and in an adolescent way, which has been online too long and which has
all the authority, for me and others, of Robert Greene's "Groats-Worth
of Wit" flame of Shakespeare as an "upstart crow".
We also teach "active reading": the series of texts I use to help
Asians succeed at US universities (those Asians being not mollycoddled
as some of you people are) have the students do a number of writing
tasks while reading. The best programmers neither take printed code as
Holy Writ nor key it into mission critical applications. They 'active
read' as I actively read my 1401 and Fortran books by being skeptical
about texts, and become thereby great programmers like me or
Schildt...whose Homeric nods result from the amplification of output
and demands on us.
Above all, Peter needs to learn maturity humanity in the sense that
people and their well-earned reputations are always more important
than artifacts. I have hopes that this will happen.
>
> -s
> --
> Copyright 2009, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nos...@seebs.nethttp://www.seebs.net/log/<-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictureshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
> --
> comp.lang.c.moderated - moderation address: c...@plethora.net -- you must
Francis Glassborow
..
>
> Above all, Peter needs to learn maturity humanity in the sense that
> people and their well-earned reputations are always more important
> than artifacts. I have hopes that this will happen.
>
somehow they bring the author as an individual into focus and then
specifically attack him rather than just the technical accuracy of his
writing (surely every reviewer is permitted to highlight the level of
accuracy of a technical work and that is hard to do without mentioning
the author by name) you seem to spend an inordinate amount of time
attacking named individuals (not just here but elsewhere on the net.
Note that 'well-earned' is a subjective judgement. I could list over a
hundred people personally known to me who have outstanding international
reputations, more than one having received prestigious awards for their
work and contributions to computer science all of whom I know to hold
the books authored by Herbert Schildt in low regard. However whether
their reputations were well-earned is a matter of opinion (I happen to
think they are)
Now I am not going to indulge in name dropping because I independently
formed my opinions on Herbert Schildt's books before ever having
discussed them with these people.
Back around 1990 when I first read a book by Herbert Schildt (probably
an early edition of 'Teach Yourself C') I was quite impressed and said
so in print. But over the next couple of years my understanding and
knowledge of C increased considerably and I came to realise that whilst
the book (and other books by him) were very readable they were full of
the kind of errors that indicated that his understanding of C was much
less than he thought it was.
Now had he been an author selling a few hundred copies it would have
been unimportant to say much about it. However, exactly because he
was/is a best selling author it becomes important to raise the issues.
And yes, there are other authors whose work is much worse than his, but
fortunately they have very little influence because they only have 3
figure sales and their errors are so gross that they will be noticed by
even the most naive reader with pretensions to become a programmer.
Note that my criticism is specifically of his books, not Herbert Schildt
as a person because I have never met him.
A number of people who include those that I consider to be technically
knowledgeable as well as excellent teachers concur in criticising the
work of an individual even though their opinions seem to have been
arrived at independently. I know of no technically competent person who
has much positive to say about the books in question. I need very strong
evidence of a conspiracy before I accept it.
When you stop attacking people rather than their beliefs, opinions and
written works I will be more tempted to listen to what you have to say.
Seebs
>> Above all, Peter needs to learn maturity humanity in the sense that
>> people and their well-earned reputations are always more important
>> than artifacts. I have hopes that this will happen.
(A fascinating question; I have valued people more than things pretty
much since the day I understood out that other people had internal awareness
and opinions, which must be going on two decades back.)
> For someone whose major complaint against Peter and Clive is that
> somehow they bring the author as an individual into focus and then
> specifically attack him rather than just the technical accuracy of his
> writing (surely every reviewer is permitted to highlight the level of
> accuracy of a technical work and that is hard to do without mentioning
> the author by name) you seem to spend an inordinate amount of time
> attacking named individuals (not just here but elsewhere on the net).
I'd noticed. I plonked him because I concluded that he had no interest
in discussing the technical merits of the issues.
I would certainly agree with the vague notion that people are more important
than artifacts. However, reputations... Reputations are of value when they
are accurate, above all else. An inaccurate reputation is just a lie without
even a liar to pin it on. It does no one any good. Schildt currently has,
among pretty much the entire programming community, a reputation for writing
extremly clearly about things he doesn't seem to understand very well. It
is a well-earned reputation.
As to the question of people, artifacts, and so on...
Imagine that you must cross a canyon, and there are two bridges across it.
You have the following information about them.
Bridge A was built by an architect who had published a number of popularized
articles and books about the principles of architectures, in which certain
engineering trivia were glossed over or generalized a bit broadly, but the
books were very clear and pleasant to read.
Bridge B was built by an architect who was regularly asked by coworkers to
check their calculations and numbers, and who had a reputation for catching
subtle errors and asking hard questions about possible failure modes in the
event of unexpected stresses, wear, or other possible damage that might occur
down the road.
I'd prefer Bridge B.
And because Bridge A could kill people, I would want other people to prefer
Bridge B, so much so that I would be okay with Bridge A's architect not being
able to keep steady work writing these popularized books, because the
engineers who grew up on them might kill people too.
C, used carefully and competently, can be a good choice for even some fairly
significant and potentially-risky software. C, used incompetently, can be
extremely dangerous. There are times when the tradeoffs make C a good choice,
but in those cases, I would rather have developers know the language well,
and that would imply not learning it from books which are inaccurate.
If it were genuinely the case that there were no decently-written books on
C which were also accurate, I could see arguing for encouraging people to
read a somewhat-inaccurate book, while explaining to them that there would be
a need to watch out for a few things. But it's simply not the case; King's
_Modern Approach_ is excellent, so far as I can tell, and I think it is both
accurate and well suited to teaching the language.
-s
--
Copyright 2009, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet...@seebs.net
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
spinoza1111
<francis.glassbo...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> spinoza1111wrote:
>
> ..
>
> > Above all, Peter needs to learn maturity humanity in the sense that
> > people and their well-earned reputations are always more important
> > than artifacts. I have hopes that this will happen.
>
> For someone whose major complaint against Peter and Clive is that
> somehow they bring the author as an individual into focus and then
> specifically attack him rather than just the technical accuracy of his
> writing (surely every reviewer is permitted to highlight the level of
> accuracy of a technical work and that is hard to do without mentioning
> the author by name) you seem to spend an inordinate amount of time
> attacking named individuals (not just here but elsewhere on the net.
If people initiate unnecessary attacks on reputations, then a right of
verbal self defense means that their own reputations are on the line.
Seebach should have declined to publish his attack on Schildt if the
book was as bad as he said it was.
>
> Note that 'well-earned' is a subjective judgement. I could list over a
> hundred people personally known to me who have outstanding international
> reputations, more than one having received prestigious awards for their
> work and contributions to computer science all of whom I know to hold
> the books authored by Herbert Schildt in low regard. However whether
> their reputations were well-earned is a matter of opinion (I happen to
> think they are)
>
> Now I am not going to indulge in name dropping because I independently
> formed my opinions on Herbert Schildt's books before ever having
> discussed them with these people.
>
> Back around 1990 when I first read a book by Herbert Schildt (probably
> an early edition of 'Teach Yourself C') I was quite impressed and said
> so in print. But over the next couple of years my understanding and
> knowledge of C increased considerably and I came to realise that whilst
> the book (and other books by him) were very readable they were full of
> the kind of errors that indicated that his understanding of C was much
> less than he thought it was.
This makes the mistake of treating C as an unchanging artfact. C
actually exists in a large number of dialects, and your opinion was
formed by your being exposed to other dialects, not in widespread use.
>
> Now had he been an author selling a few hundred copies it would have
> been unimportant to say much about it. However, exactly because he
> was/is a best selling author it becomes important to raise the issues.
> And yes, there are other authors whose work is much worse than his, but
> fortunately they have very little influence because they only have 3
> figure sales and their errors are so gross that they will be noticed by
> even the most naive reader with pretensions to become a programmer.
I think you should have published an alternative book on C, identified
as being Fair and Balanced with respect to the Windows/unix divide,
rather than scapegoating Schildt. Schildt was not making scientific
"errors" about an unchanging feature of the world. Instead, he was
reporting what was best practice on by far the most common C platform.
If you had a problem with Microsoft's dominance of the industry, then
you should have had the balls to say so. You should have not
participated in a cowardly attack on a person who was in a sense an
employee making a product for a company.
It would have been wrong for you to attack Dave Cutler of Microsoft,
to name and shame him for being the chief technical lead on Windows
NT. McGraw Hill asked Schildt to write about C, or he proposed the
book: either way, its editorial and marketing people probably decided
to focus in the needs of the most common C programmers. Had Schildt
gone in-depth on all possible ways to write C at the time, at which C
already existed in multiple versions, the book would have been
unsaleable.
Bill Gates was the man to criticise, if any. He forced marched
development at Microsoft and terminated competent people who
questioned his direction, resulting in systems, including C compilers,
which had numerous bugs: I found one such bug for John Nash.
But the mess created was in a somewhat Frankensteiny way "good enough"
and programmers needed training to manage it. We can't all have safe
little jobs in universities or with the most fashionable vendors, can
we? And good, honest employees can make deficient software work.
But to do so, they need to be held somewhat harmless. Schildt was in a
sense an employee, and thus your attack was something like the person
who screams at the Help desk clerk on the phone, with all the futility
and ugliness that implies. It was like attacking Dave Cutler for
working 24 hour days to deliver Windows NT. It was ersatz for having
the courage to speak the real truth to the real power.
>
> Note that my criticism is specifically of his books, not Herbert Schildt
> as a person because I have never met him.
You have enabled people who have called him foul names online.
>
> A number of people who include those that I consider to be technically
> knowledgeable as well as excellent teachers concur in criticising the
> work of an individual even though their opinions seem to have been
> arrived at independently. I know of no technically competent person who
> has much positive to say about the books in question. I need very strong
> evidence of a conspiracy before I accept it.
>
> When you stop attacking people rather than their beliefs, opinions and
> written works I will be more tempted to listen to what you have to say.
I did not start this shit. I did not accept money for damaging a man's
reputation so needlessly. But after what happened to Kathy Sierra, I
think your Schildt campaign endangers people who are just trying to do
their jobs, and I think it's ersatz for speaking truth to power.
> --
> comp.lang.c.moderated - moderation address: c...@plethora.net -- you must
spinoza1111
> On 2009-09-13, Francis Glassborow <francis.glassbo...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>
> >> Above all, Peter needs to learn maturity humanity in the sense that
> >> people and their well-earned reputations are always more important
> >> than artifacts. I have hopes that this will happen.
>
> (A fascinating question; I have valued people more than things pretty
> much since the day I understood out that other people had internal awareness
> and opinions, which must be going on two decades back.)
Your behavior wrt Schildt gives no evidence of this.
>
> > For someone whose major complaint against Peter and Clive is that
> > somehow they bring the author as an individual into focus and then
> > specifically attack him rather than just the technical accuracy of his
> > writing (surely every reviewer is permitted to highlight the level of
> > accuracy of a technical work and that is hard to do without mentioning
> > the author by name) you seem to spend an inordinate amount of time
> > attacking named individuals (not just here but elsewhere on the net).
>
> I'd noticed. I plonked him because I concluded that he had no interest
> in discussing the technical merits of the issues.
>
> I would certainly agree with the vague notion that people are more important
How is it vague? I am being quite precise: cf John Rawls on lexical
priority.
> than artifacts. However, reputations... Reputations are of value when they
> are accurate, above all else. An inaccurate reputation is just a lie without
> even a liar to pin it on. It does no one any good. Schildt currently has,
> among pretty much the entire programming community, a reputation for writing
> extremly clearly about things he doesn't seem to understand very well. It
> is a well-earned reputation.
You cannot even express your case, because it is impossible to be both
clear, and not to understand what you're talking about. This is not
even possible in philosophy.
>
> As to the question of people, artifacts, and so on...
> Imagine that you must cross a canyon, and there are two bridges across it.
>
> You have the following information about them.
>
> Bridge A was built by an architect who had published a number of popularized
> articles and books about the principles of architectures, in which certain
> engineering trivia were glossed over or generalized a bit broadly, but the
> books were very clear and pleasant to read.
>
> Bridge B was built by an architect who was regularly asked by coworkers to
> check their calculations and numbers, and who had a reputation for catching
> subtle errors and asking hard questions about possible failure modes in the
> event of unexpected stresses, wear, or other possible damage that might occur
> down the road.
>
> I'd prefer Bridge B.
Sigh. Eye roll. Crotch grab.
I am tired of physical analogues. Whether you like it or not,
programming is not at all like building bridges, although safety plays
a part, especially in mission critical applications, which Schildt did
NOT cover: furthermore, if you are in mission critical mode you don't
use something so globally unsafe as C: why do you suppose Ada and
Eiffel were developed?
Programming, whether you like it or not, is the communication of our
intentions as to using computers to a discourse community. Knuth said
this: Dijsktra said this. We have also discovered that in programming,
precision is not coextensive with truth, and that we can learn little
from civil engineers, since when programming needs the legal "clout"
of civil engineering, it gets this by going through civil engineers.
To imagine the programmer as independently and totally responsible for
safety as you do above is dressing yourself in borrowed robes.
I designed, implemented and developed the hydrostatic stability
assurance software for the vessel that discovered the ruined Titanic,
and this program was adopted by several universities. I used True
Basic instead of C. I was just as interested as anyone else in
validity and safety in this program, which provided documentation to
the US Coast Guard that the USCG required to permit research vessels
to leave port.
But key to safety was not details of a programming language. It was
the social fact that a registered ocean engineer certified my work.
For this reason, to charge Herbert Schildt with endangering public
safety is nonsense and an insult to his readers.
Can you honestly point to a malfeasing programmer standing in the dock
at Old Bailey, and saying, "yes m'lud, I dunnit. I read Herbert
Schildt's book on C, and I returned void, and thousands of people
died".
You cannot, because responsible and hard working programmers take
things cum grano salis and don't scan pages of Schildt into character
recognizing software and run the result!
Whether you like it or not, world-wide there is an industry of
training and self-education in which working people read crappy books
and attend computer classes in the slums of India. The quality of this
training varies widely yet people are able to construct software
systems and build buildings that stand up. Where it makes sense to
legally certify engineers, this is done, but since programming
postdated modern engineering, the certified end users are responsible
for the final safety and validity.
It would be better for programmers to have more on the job clout about
safety and validity. It would be best for them to be able to take the
time to do a quality job. But this is a different issue from Schildt's
books.
If people like Schildt and Kathy Sierra have to look over their
shoulder to see if someone is secretly destroying them on the
Internet, you can bet that you'll not make software any safer. By
making Schildt the issue, you did nothing to improve C programming
praxis.
>
> And because Bridge A could kill people, I would want other people to prefer
> Bridge B, so much so that I would be okay with Bridge A's architect not being
> able to keep steady work writing these popularized books, because the
> engineers who grew up on them might kill people too.
>
> C, used carefully and competently, can be a good choice for even some fairly
> significant and potentially-risky software. C, used incompetently, can be
> extremely dangerous. There are times when the tradeoffs make C a good choice,
> but in those cases, I would rather have developers know the language well,
> and that would imply not learning it from books which are inaccurate.
A literate person does not so divide books into sheep and goats. A
Nazi or religious fundamentalist does this all the time.
>
> If it were genuinely the case that there were no decently-written books on
> C which were also accurate, I could see arguing for encouraging people to
> read a somewhat-inaccurate book, while explaining to them that there would be
> a need to watch out for a few things. But it's simply not the case; King's
> _Modern Approach_ is excellent, so far as I can tell, and I think it is both
> accurate and well suited to teaching the language.
>
> -s
> --
> Copyright 2009, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nos...@seebs.nethttp://www.seebs.net/log/<-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictureshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
> --
> comp.lang.c.moderated - moderation address: c...@plethora.net -- you must
Francis Glassborow
> On Sep 13, 8:33 pm, Francis Glassborow
> <francis.glassbo...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>> spinoza1111wrote:
>>
>> ..
>>
>>> Above all, Peter needs to learn maturity humanity in the sense that
>>> people and their well-earned reputations are always more important
>>> than artifacts. I have hopes that this will happen.
>> For someone whose major complaint against Peter and Clive is that
>> somehow they bring the author as an individual into focus and then
>> specifically attack him rather than just the technical accuracy of his
>> writing (surely every reviewer is permitted to highlight the level of
>> accuracy of a technical work and that is hard to do without mentioning
>> the author by name) you seem to spend an inordinate amount of time
>> attacking named individuals (not just here but elsewhere on the net.
>
> If people initiate unnecessary attacks on reputations, then a right of
> verbal self defense means that their own reputations are on the line.
> Seebach should have declined to publish his attack on Schildt if the
> book was as bad as he said it was.
You keep confusing a critique of a technical book with an attack on a
person. It seems that you think that someone with a high reputation is
beyond criticism.
Francis Glassborow
> On Sep 13, 9:19 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>> On 2009-09-13, Francis Glassborow <francis.glassbo...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>>
>>> spinoza1111wrote:
>>>> Above all, Peter needs to learn maturity humanity in the sense that
>>>> people and their well-earned reputations are always more important
>>>> than artifacts. I have hopes that this will happen.
>> (A fascinating question; I have valued people more than things pretty
>> much since the day I understood out that other people had internal awareness
>> and opinions, which must be going on two decades back.)
>
> Your behavior wrt Schildt gives no evidence of this.
I can find no evidence to support you contention. Peter correctly
identified errors in books written by Schildt. Some of those errors
seemed unlikely to have been made by anyone who actually understood C.
But nowhere has he ever launched a personal attack on Schildt.
Contrast that with your treatment of Clive Feather and Peter. Without
any evidence you have attacked them personally.
>>> For someone whose major complaint against Peter and Clive is that
>>> somehow they bring the author as an individual into focus and then
>>> specifically attack him rather than just the technical accuracy of his
>>> writing (surely every reviewer is permitted to highlight the level of
>>> accuracy of a technical work and that is hard to do without mentioning
>>> the author by name) you seem to spend an inordinate amount of time
>>> attacking named individuals (not just here but elsewhere on the net).
>> I'd noticed. I plonked him because I concluded that he had no interest
>> in discussing the technical merits of the issues.
>>
>> I would certainly agree with the vague notion that people are more important
>
> How is it vague? I am being quite precise: cf John Rawls on lexical
> priority.
What on Earth are you talking about. The evidence is that once you were
a programmer but currently your writing is at variance with that.
>
>> than artifacts. However, reputations... Reputations are of value when they
>> are accurate, above all else. An inaccurate reputation is just a lie without
>> even a liar to pin it on. It does no one any good. Schildt currently has,
>> among pretty much the entire programming community, a reputation for writing
>> extremly clearly about things he doesn't seem to understand very well. It
>> is a well-earned reputation.
>
> You cannot even express your case, because it is impossible to be both
> clear, and not to understand what you're talking about. This is not
> even possible in philosophy.
It is entirely possible to be both clear and wrong. The above paragraph
is a fine example of that :-)
Francis Glassborow
Needlessly? Is it needless to draw attention to errors? And assuming
that what happened to Kathy Sierra is actually what you think happened
(not everyone agrees with you) it is an entirely different class to what
various technical experts have written about some of the books authored
by Schildt.
Now I have just taken a bit of time reading Peter's critique of C: The
Complete Reference and Clive Feather's Critique of 'The Annotated C
Standard'
I suppose someone who is hyper sensitive might take offence at the title
of the latter but the content is rather mild. Had I been writing that
article there would have been rather more substance (sorry Peter).
However even if the title had been 'C: A Complete Reference for users of
the Microsoft Implementation' it would still have been erroneous.
When I look at Clive's effort I can only ask what is wrong with it. It
simply attempts to itemise all the faults in the annotation. If the
reader wishes to deduce that the author does not know C as well as he
thinks he does then that is a legitimate conclusion. OTOH I might wonder
if the author just wanted to get the book in print and so did not seek
the level of technical review that such a book requires.
None of us expect perfection (The C 1989 C Standard contained a good
number of errors, but unlike Schilds books there was a continuous effort
to remove them with technical corrigenda) but no one should be offended
by a list of errors.
Note, not even a single death threat :-)
Seebs
> I suppose someone who is hyper sensitive might take offence at the title
> of the latter but the content is rather mild. Had I been writing that
> article there would have been rather more substance (sorry Peter).
No offense taken! I wrote it in an idle afternoon something over ten years
ago.
> None of us expect perfection (The C 1989 C Standard contained a good
> number of errors, but unlike Schilds books there was a continuous effort
> to remove them with technical corrigenda) but no one should be offended
> by a list of errors.
Obviously, some are. I was once fired from a job partially for listing
errors. Apparently, the kid just out of college is not supposed to be that
critical of code written by senior developers, even if it's wrong.
(Think "multiple malloc and free calls in an inner loop of a
performance-critical application which is struggling to meet performance
targets, specifically used for a case-insensitive string compare operation.")
-s
--
Copyright 2009, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet...@seebs.net
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
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