Re: As a matter of interest

On Sep 13, 10:36 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2009-09-13, Francis Glassborow <francis.glassbo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.

He at least sometimes claims to be "Edward G.Nilges"; at least, that was
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
--
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