>> I prefer C++'s difficulty because intense attention to detail can >> ensure a safe and correct program, but with Java there's a higher >> level of non-beneficial abstraction (the VM) below which one cannot >> penetrate. If I write a seemingly-correct Java program and it doesn't >> perform properly, there is less I can do about it. (Or, maybe, I don't >> know the tools well enough to investigate and overcome problems with >> the libraries and VM.)
>I quite like the notion of putting a long, sharp spike in the middle >of the steering column on automobiles.
>This mandates that the driver apply intense attention ...
Thank you.I have never before been able to make out why I like hanging by one finger from the front of the Uptown IRT Express as it hurtles from Times Square to 72nd Street. Focuses the mind, I tell you, almost as good as the prospect of getting shot at in two weeks.
Kenny Tilton <ktil...@nyc.rr.com> wrote: > Thank you.I have never before been able to make out why I like hanging by > one finger from the front of the Uptown IRT Express as it hurtles from Times > Square to 72nd Street. Focuses the mind, I tell you, almost as good as the > prospect of getting shot at in two weeks.
As opposed to one week?
Michael
-- Michael Sullivan Business Card Express of CT Thermographers to the Trade Cheshire, CT mich...@bcect.com
Christopher Browne <cbbro...@acm.org> writes: > Does that not sound like a wonderful idea?
Oh, you guys are having a blast with this one.
Let me try to restate the point. If everything in a system is made "simple" and "easy" but it still doesn't work, one can't do anything about it. If a system allows more under-the-hood tinkering, and one encounters problems, one can delve deeper and perhaps effect change. So long as my job depends upon me producing a working system, I choose C++ over Java because with it I have greater control over my success.
The preference is related more to the Not-Invented-Here syndrome than to masochism.
>>>>> "EN" == Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> writes:
EN> But you have acquired skills and an interest in improving EN> your condition that is much more beneficial than staying with EN> a language that exhibits diminishing returns for a constant EN> increase in effort.
But the realities of needing to eat make this impossible. I'm bored with the web, and with Java, and to a lesser extent with Perl (mainly because the problems I solve with it are so repetitive, and I've already automated them as far as I can). I would love to find interesting problems to solve, and learn new things to solve them with. I would love to jump ship and find a job where I got new problems to solve on a regular basis, rather than solving the same old tired problem repeatedly, or having to play political games to solve the problem correctly. But every approach to doing so involves a tradeoff I'm not willing to make, and so at this point, given what I've observed of the state of the industry, my plan at this point is to get out as soon as possible.
And I don't expect there *are* solutions, the psychology of business beign what it is. Cheap mediocrity coupled with buzzword-compliance always seems to win in the end.
>>>>> "EN" == Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> writes:
EN> The crop of "computer scientists" these days has been drawn EN> from the middle of the Gauss curve, with so little sign of EN> excellence and real talent that it would simply be /wrong/ to EN> base an operation on intelligent, thinking, creative, /good/ EN> programmers.
EN> /Really/ good people tend to "discover" Common Lisp quite EN> independently of their formal education, but my take on this EN> is that you cannot acquire the foundation to appreciate Common EN> Lisp in today's programming world if you have not gone through EN> a lot of drudgery.
EN> The only problem I can see is that people cannot get EN> programming work that is commensurate with their intelligence EN> and skills. This, however, is not Java's fault.
The sad thing is, I'm an outlier in the Gauss curve. I *can't* find work commensurate with my intelligence and skills, at least not anywhere I have looked, and not in any quantity sufficient to support myself, and I am bone-tired of the sort of relentless mediocrity that the culture of Java encourages.
This is not to say that Java is a bad language; I think it's probably one of the better languages in broad use today. But I've seen a team of mediocre Java programmers take two man-years to do what I could do myself in Perl in approximately two weeks; C probably would have taken me closer to a month. (Yes, Erik, I know of your differences with Perl. We differ on that; until I can work in LISP, Perl will simply have to do.) How is it in any way wise for business to hire a team of six Java-enabled consultants at double to triple what they're paying me (considered hourly), and pay them for two-man years, instead of paying me for a month? And then I get to support the broken Java code and the broken Java application server on top of it all, and the support costs of that are substantially higher than they would be for a Perl- or C-based solution for this particular problem.
Mediocre programmers are mediocre programmers, regardless of the language. Far, far better for business to hire intelligent people who use efficient and powerful tools than to hire mediocrities who attack all problems with Java -- especially because *this* non-mediocre programmer is being driven out of the field entirely by boredom and frustration. Create a culture favorable to mediocre people and hostile to smart ones, and mediocre people will be the only ones who can stand it.
> ... I would love to jump ship and find a job where I got new > problems to solve on a regular basis, rather than solving the same old > tired problem repeatedly, ...
become a large-installation sysadmin. read burgess et al "Selected Papers" [1] for a large number of problems people attacked in the past. have fun. :)
oz --- [1] Eric Anderson, Mark Burgess, Alva Couch (Eds) Selected Papers in Network and System Administration John Wiley & Sons, Jan 2002. ISBN: 0470843853
-- if you do not work on important problems how can you expect to do important work? -- richard w. hamming
* Charlton Wilbur <cwil...@mithril.chromatico.net> | How is it in any way wise for business to hire a team of six Java-enabled | consultants at double to triple what they're paying me (considered | hourly), and pay them for two-man years, instead of paying me for a | month?
They can /find/ the six Java-enabled consultants with significantly less energy than they would spend to find you. They can understand what the Java people spend their time on. They can replace one of them at very low marginal costs. They can replace all of them at very low cost. But above all, mediocre people are much more managable then smart people.
| And then I get to support the broken Java code and the broken Java | application server on top of it all, and the support costs of that are | substantially higher than they would be for a Perl- or C-based solution | for this particular problem.
Why not reimplement it, then? Show them your new and improved solution and charge them a lot of money for /not/ needing expensive support on it.
| Mediocre programmers are mediocre programmers, regardless of the | language. Far, far better for business to hire intelligent people who | use efficient and powerful tools than to hire mediocrities who attack all | problems with Java -- especially because *this* non-mediocre programmer | is being driven out of the field entirely by boredom and frustration.
But it is not the other mediocre programmers who are at fault for this. This is entirely and solely a managerial problem, and it is partly based in the belief that programming is "risky" and hiring controllable people will help reduce the risk. People buy insurance because they want to lower their risks, and it is far from uncommon to choose paths that are more expensive but safer than alternatives. You have to realize that a manager needs to feel on top of things at all times and "trust me" does not work as often as one would expect or hope. Being right is not enough -- other people need to discover it and trust their findings, too.
| Create a culture favorable to mediocre people and hostile to smart ones, | and mediocre people will be the only ones who can stand it.
This has already happened to the managers. Mediocre people are often afraid of smart people. A smart manager is not afraid to hire someone smarter than himself because his self-confidence is sufficiently stable that he cannot suddenly feel like an inferior human being because he does not grasp what his employees are doing.
It appears to me that once you get above a certain intelligence level, like two standard deviations from the average, our society has done enough to hone various aspects of your personality to be confident in your ability to deal with a complex reality. I do not have any evidence to suggest that this is "innate", but it does appear that the average intelligence of human beings is much too low when we see how people are utterly unable to deal with their own situation, and much less anything bigger than their immediate personal needs. It is a miracle that smart people got into sufficiently powerful positions that they could impose the rule of law on the masses who would much prefer to take revenge on whoever passes for scapegoat than achieve justice. Equally gigantic is the invention of /history/ as a field of study, as opposed to myths and heroic tales, where the facts of historic events was considered superior to the moronic "the winner writes the history" myth-spinning nonsense that conflated "story" and "history". Our modern times have apparently evolved faster than the average in human intelligence has evolved with it, because now history is replaced by political correctness and facts by marketing and propaganda, mistakes of the past are no longer there to be studied and learned from, they are to be denied. All this suggests that the mediocre have regained the power they had in pre-civilized times, before rule of law, history, and science, where the need to "feel good now" is vastly more important than improving your condition.
The above should suggest that I think the Revenge of Mediocrity is upon us, that the day of philosophers and thinkers and the really intelligent is basically over. From the election of George W. Bush (which heralded the end of the United States and its dominant role in world politics) to the anti-technological, anti-intelligence, anti-science, anti-prosperity crap about global warming being our fault, the mediocre have gained so much power that anyone who would be have the mental wherewithal to go against the majority viewpoint to do something that would really improve the human condition (like the bravery of the real statesmen who fought to abolish slavery in the United States and who are now all but destroyed by the idiots who want reparations for the slavery that the people they want the reparations from fought to abolish) would never achieve that power, and if they did, the majority would successfully fight them.
Our entire Western culture /is/ favorable to mediocre people and hostile to smart ones. The worst aspect of anti-intelligence is mass marketing, which has driven the most anti-intellectual of all aspects of human existence: the entertainment industry, especially TV, which makes people lose concentration on their work so they can rush home and watch TV and which gives people who want to avoid work a reason to bask in laziness.
Why should running businesses or programming computers be any different?
The Western hemisphere will not recover from its current problems until it destroys the notion that marketing must be a push technology. The Internet may in fact be the facilitator for a cultural change that rivals the industrial revolution in magnitude for human existence, by /undoing/ the damage that has been done to our world by pushing mass marketing on people. The transition from push to pull marketing has already started, but it will take many years to produce the ground-breaking results I expect it to have, and it will require massive resources to do it, but people are already fed up with push marketing and those who work with pull marketing technology have already made significant inroads into the traditional push markets -- one particular area that has seen so much change that newspapers suffer greatly, is job ads, where Internet-based job-matching services are so much more efficient and cost-effective. When the end of push marketing comes -- it should take less than 20 years from now -- it will have transformed our culture like nothing else in recent memory, and society will no longer be so heavily optimized for the average but will allow niches to work for individual needs both well below and well above average and we will see life change from demanding the same results for everyone (a desire that is a direct result of mass marketing that has only resulted in everybody being unhappy) to actually fulfilling real needs, which are already so diverse that the mass market is unable to fulfill all the real needs of /anyone/ in particular.
It may be too late for many of us, but I believe those who want to get a taste of the future must jump off the mass-marketing bandwagon that got us the prosperity we have today and which enables us to get even richer with pull technology. Powerful computers running powerful software will be the cornerstone of the pull marketing strategy. The software needed to build and run this new and better world cannot be written by mediocre people today because the mediocre can only solve already solved problems. The really smart can yet stop the Revenge of Mediocrity from destroying human civilization by reverting to short-range, non-thinking brutality.
-- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
* Charlton Wilbur | my plan at this point is to get out as soon as possible.
You will not be the first. Many good people have left, already. Some claim that all the really bright people have already left the IT industry.
| Cheap mediocrity coupled with buzzword-compliance always seems to win in | the end.
Not on the end. When mediocrity takes over, it is because it can. Like, if a herd of grazing animals got sick and could no longer outrun their predators, even the most incompetent predator could catch some, but when the herd was all eaten, the end result is that all but the best predators die of starvation as the best predators would have gone elsewhere. The sad part is that if this process takes too long, the best also get lazy.
-- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
> EN> But you have acquired skills and an interest in improving > EN> your condition that is much more beneficial than staying with > EN> a language that exhibits diminishing returns for a constant > EN> increase in effort.
> But the realities of needing to eat make this impossible. I'm bored > with the web, and with Java, and to a lesser extent with Perl (mainly > because the problems I solve with it are so repetitive, and I've > already automated them as far as I can).
This, IMO, is one major problem with the way your average, high-lines-of-code production programmer is trained. I've put together systems that automate some class of tasks, and reduce the effort needed to do the task by an order of magnitude or more. One system would create entire web sites based on interactive prompting that took about two hours -- add another three hours to finish the job, and you've got the site up in one day, with plenty of time to read mail and usenet. To put up one of these sites by hand, basing it on the code for a similar site, would take a "hot-shot" programmer two weeks or so. Others would take 3-4. I documented the hell out of this system, including both in-depth and introductory documentation. Did anyone but me use it? I'll let you guess :-(. For some reason, people who consider themselves programmers don't mind being trained users of complex systems where most of the work has already been done, like Java or Perl -- but if the system doesn't have an O'Reilly book, they won't go for it.
-- /|_ .-----------------------. ,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war | ,--' _,' | Wage class war! | / / `-----------------------' ( -. | | ) | (`-. '--.) `. )----'
t...@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> on the code for a similar site, would take a "hot-shot" programmer two > weeks or so. Others would take 3-4. I documented the hell out of > this system, including both in-depth and introductory documentation. > Did anyone but me use it? I'll let you guess :-(. For some reason,
Charlton Wilbur <cwil...@mithril.chromatico.net> writes: > Create a culture favorable to mediocre people and hostile to > smart ones, and mediocre people will be the only ones who can > stand it.
i think this follows from the peter principle.
your quest, then, is to become a boss w/ clue (and hire some lisp programmers, thanks in advance) in order to aim for the jugular (see "generalized peter principle").
Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> writes: > The really smart can yet stop the Revenge of Mediocrity from > destroying human civilization by reverting to short-range, > non-thinking brutality.
i find this sentence ambiguous. please clarify: who is to promulgate this brutality, the mediocre or the would-be really smart? the former is consistent w/ the rest of the post, but the latter is indicated given normal binding patterns for "by".
* Thomas F. Burdick | I documented the hell out of this system, including both in-depth and | introductory documentation. : | For some reason, people who consider themselves programmers don't mind | being trained users of complex systems where most of the work has already | been done, like Java or Perl -- but if the system doesn't have an O'Reilly | book, they won't go for it.
Call Tim and get an animal and their formatting guidelines and produce a mock-up of an O'Reilly book using your documentation that you can give to people who consider themselves programmers but refuse to use your system.
-- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
* Erik Naggum | The really smart can yet stop the Revenge of Mediocrity from | destroying human civilization by reverting to short-range, | non-thinking brutality.
* Thien-Thi Nguyen | i find this sentence ambiguous. please clarify: who is to promulgate | this brutality, the mediocre or the would-be really smart? the former is | consistent w/ the rest of the post, but the latter is indicated given | normal binding patterns for "by".
Strange. It is self-contradictory when it is read as "stop by", and does have pretty clear meaning when it is read as "destroy by". Yes, it is ambiguous the same way "time flies like a banana" is, but if you already noted the consistency part, what could have been ambiguous? Is it because the Revenge of Mediocrity is not an agent in your view that you think actions can be taken only by the really smart, which obviously are an agent? Would it have changed meaning in your eyes if it had been "the Revenge of the Mediocre", like that expression went when it was written but before editing and posting?
-- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
> * Thomas F. Burdick >| I documented the hell out of this system, including both in-depth and >| introductory documentation. >: >| For some reason, people who consider themselves programmers don't >| mind being trained users of complex systems where most of the work >| has already been done, like Java or Perl -- but if the system doesn't >| have an O'Reilly book, they won't go for it.
> Call Tim and get an animal and their formatting guidelines and > produce a mock-up of an O'Reilly book using your documentation that > you can give to people who consider themselves programmers but > refuse to use your system.
Well you could go to Dover Press and not have to bother Tim, O'Reilly gets there cover art from Dover clipart.
Just had to plug Dover Press, great books at great prices.
marc
ps there is an O'Reilly cover maker some where on line, don't have the link handy.
Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> writes: > but if you already noted the consistency part, what could have > been ambiguous?
sometimes to counter a force you can use the force "in kind". if medocrity results in unthinking brutality, unthinking brutality is perhaps a tactic useful to counter mediocrity. civilization is not destroyed by this, but only by mis-application of this. (it is possible to be excellent and unthinkingly brutal all at once, to the benefit of civilization, basically.)
> Is it because the Revenge of Mediocrity is not an agent in > your view that you think actions can be taken only by the > really smart, which obviously are an agent? Would it have > changed meaning in your eyes if it had been "the Revenge of > the Mediocre", like that expression went when it was written > but before editing and posting?
no. noun-phrase construction variance is within my understanding of human expression, usually.
Chris Beggy <chr...@kippona.com> writes: > t...@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> > on the code for a similar site, would take a "hot-shot" programmer two > > weeks or so. Others would take 3-4. I documented the hell out of > > this system, including both in-depth and introductory documentation. > > Did anyone but me use it? I'll let you guess :-(. For some reason,
> Is you code available?
No, I wrote it, but it was work-for-hire. Besides, it wasn't factored very well (I was trying to get it done in the expected 2-2.5 weeks), so it would only be good for creating things that compete fiarly directly with the company I wrote it for. It was 75% elisp, though, which made all the difference. (Wow, look at that, the topic came full circle).
-- /|_ .-----------------------. ,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war | ,--' _,' | Wage class war! | / / `-----------------------' ( -. | | ) | (`-. '--.) `. )----'
Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> writes: > * Thomas F. Burdick > | I documented the hell out of this system, including both in-depth and > | introductory documentation. > : > | For some reason, people who consider themselves programmers don't mind > | being trained users of complex systems where most of the work has already > | been done, like Java or Perl -- but if the system doesn't have an O'Reilly > | book, they won't go for it.
> Call Tim and get an animal and their formatting guidelines and produce a > mock-up of an O'Reilly book using your documentation that you can give to > people who consider themselves programmers but refuse to use your system.
Heh, that's not a bad idea for the next time I run into this. I'm very prone to automating tasks, because I find it less mind-numbing, and occasionally such systems are useful to people other than me, so I run into this on a semi-regular basis. I'll just have to be sure to use the typeface(s) that O'Reilly uses, and resist the tempatation to set the type in a face more appropriate for the engravings.
-- /|_ .-----------------------. ,' .\ / | No to Imperialist war | ,--' _,' | Wage class war! | / / `-----------------------' ( -. | | ) | (`-. '--.) `. )----'
> Well you could go to Dover Press and not have to bother Tim, O'Reilly > gets there cover art from Dover clipart.
indeed. it is
Animals: 1419 Copyright-Free Illustrations of Mammals, Birds, Fish, Insects etc A Pictorial Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources Selected by Jim Harter Dover Publications, 1979.
0-486-23766-4
camel on pp. 59, image 241. llama on pp. 60, image 242. python on pp 178, image 800.
:)
oz --- if you couldn't find any weirdness, maybe we'll just have to make some! -- hobbes
On 25 Oct 2002 22:11:54 -0400, ozan s yigit <o...@blue.cs.yorku.ca> said:
osy> i'm disappointed that the dodo image (pp 124, #543) is not amongst osy> the seven animals chosen. i don't recall seeing it on any o'reilly osy> cover...
Because, as Genesis sang, `the dodo must die'...
---Vassil.
-- For an M-person job assigned to an N-person team, only rarely M=N.
Marc Spitzer wrote: > Well you could go to Dover Press and not have to bother Tim, O'Reilly > gets there cover art from Dover clipart.
Not all of it, by any means. They employ an artist to do new animals for them. (I think her name is Lorrie Somethingorother; the all-knowing Google will doubtless tell you more.)
-- Gareth McCaughan Gareth.McCaug...@pobox.com .sig under construc
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