Re: As a matter of interest

On Sep 13, 9:19 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2009-09-13, Francis Glassborow <francis.glassbo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.

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
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