I don't mean to defendNilges,
Of course you don't, since the dynamics of this group is based on the
childish (and ultimately Fascistic) creation of people-with-cooties
who infect any friends with cooties in a caricatured transitive
relationship...the psychological origins of which are partially in the
primitive-regressive response to disease: the syphilis panic producing
Nazi talk, the AIDs panic reviving it.
but there might be some vague truth to
his assertion that 'AP class somehow cover nothing the material in the
courses they replace'. A few years ago I had a room mate that attended
UC Berkeley as a Biology major. He had told me that in 12th grade, it
only took him 30 minutes to do the AP Calculus exam. He said he got a
5 out of 5 and then told me that AP Calculus exam didn't prove
anything. He made similar comments to both the AP English and AP
Chemistry exams. That's enough off topic rambling from me.
I haven't seen where Seebach has claimed to have taken the AP exam in
computer science, but an examination won't give you the BS in computer
science, it will only allow you to skip the 101 class. Seebach's
discussions elsethread about parentheses and his claim that Schildt
erred in using the concept of stack to explain runtime make it clear
that he's never been forced to write even a small compiler-
interpreter, which remains a skill that separates the men from the
boys. He was unqualified to pass judgement on Schildt.
It's clear from Seebach's psychotic and infantile attacks on Schildt
that Seebach has a deep problem with listening to a mentor, possibly
relating to a dysfunction in his relationship with his own father. His
Mom seems to be a strong and in her screwed up Tea Bag way a smart
woman based on her public blog. But boys need their fathers to learn
that compassion which makes them fit members of civil discourse...who
don't spew lies about other people. There's a curious absence. I can
only speculate that it results from that form of twisted feminism
which "empowers" women by silencing male mentors, teachers, and here,
computer authors.
Seebach seems to be without listening skills, and to name this absence
fashionably as ADD. Schildt may have reminded him of professors who
talked on and on, not always getting the details right, while Seebach
tuned out. Unable to muster the focus and work ethic to do a genuine
tech review of Schildt, Seebach prefers to find random errors without
the slightest ability to classify the errors he claims to have found.
This is an after the fact justification of Seebach's inadequacy as a
listener.
I was rather upset myself in my first computer class over the fact
that the textbook covered the IBM 7094 and not the IBM 1401, and I
felt discriminated against, somewhat, as a Gentile in a predominantly
Jewish math milieu. However, at the time, no Mommy was mollycoddling
me. Instead, I had a low draft number and was hanging on to a student
deferment, and I realized it was time to **** or walk. Therefore, I
acquired the IBM 1401 reference manual at the IBM "retail shop" on the
Chicago river and taught myself machine and assembler language
programming.
At this point, the professor tried to introduce Fortran as the next
step; but the compiler had a bug, so we were expected to schlep up to
Science Research Associates and again overcome the resistance of a
bunch of computer operators to run our programs. But by that time I
and most of the student body were on strike, and I decided to skip
Fortran for the time being (a year later, I found the bug in the
compiler and then learned Fortran). This aporia earned me a B in this
era of NO grade inflation.
In fine, although we were inhaling, and marching, and protesting, we
were more mature than the current generation; Tom Wolfe remarked upon
the fact that French students of that era would spend the day throwing
tear gas back at police in Paris, but then go home to a bourgeois
dinner with their parents. We were more mature because it was **** or
walk. Whereas many American white kids graduate with an unusable BA
and move back in with Daddy and Mommy, or perhaps preferably with a
divorced Mommy who is unable to throw them out, not being backstopped
with Godzilla-Dad anymore.
It appears to me that WHITE students in Amerikkka today are molly-
coddled. For example, when I worked at Princeton, merely
matriculating, and doing a minimum amount of work, outside the hard
science, computer science, and math, meant straight As. I was treated
with undeserved awe on an Outward Bound expedition because the other
patrol members thought that even being employed was "getting into
Princeton", and they'd applied and been rejected.
I hardly wanted to put my five years with Princeton on my resume,
because many headhunters would call me thinking I had a Princeton
degree, and I was proud to have graduated from Roosevelt because
unlike Princeton, its senior class had never voted Hitler "most
admired" and unlike Princeton, Roosevelt never discriminated; whereas
Princeton would not admit Paul Robeson and even in recent years has
discriminated against Asian males.
But a friend told me, just be honest about the relationship, and if
people want to make a mistake in your favor, let it be.
The white students of wealthy background at Princeton were with
significant exceptions, a pretty arrogant lot. Some of them carried a
sign at the Princeton p-rade of 1989 reversing the Princeton slogan
"Princeton in the Nation's Service": the p-rade sign said, "The Nation
in Princeton's Service, Wall Street here we come".
The computer science majors were an exception, as were the women
English majors. In general, the students from poor and lower-middle
class backgrounds on scholarship with jobs in Info Centers were a
bunch of stars in my view. The problem was the children, grand-
children, and great-gc of arrogant wealthy alumni, and the children of
celebrities. They treated Princeton as a nonstop party, and deaths
resulted including the deaths of two undergraduates inveighled into
climbing the chapel.
The sense of white entitlement reaches down on the social scale and it
is found in "advanced placement" and parents who complain vociferously
when their Little Darlings get a B. Whereas our friends at IUT in
Bangladesh have to WORK. They take hours standing on public transit to
get to school. In many Asian universities, the professor does not
admit latecomers. And they can probably define "C" accurately.
Whereas American programmers master one or two languages...and spend
the rest of their careers speaking out of ignorance about paradigms
they don't want to learn, and stabbing their coworkers in the back.
The result, is that many of them wind up driving cabs after a career
typically not more than ten years. For consolation, they turn to the
Fascism of the Tea Baggers.
