"spinoza1111" <
[email protected]> ha scritto nel messaggio#io_x
...latest code...
<snip>
In view of the face that NO OTHER POSTER (to my knowledge) has met the
requirements (code a string replace function without string.h usage) I
hereby declare victory, and award myself the Golden Spinoza Order of
Purity and Truth har har.
Seriously, I have demonstrated, I believe, that Republicans can't code
worth dick, but they can (if Peter Seebach is still a Republican) say
"there is a bug in my code but I'm fucked if I'll fix it", and they
sure can backstab and lie. That is: there is an entire programming
world-view, a Gestalt, that is complete malarkey and normalized
deviance. It consists of the inchoate saws and maxims that have
accumulated over time, that have sifted down from on-high from capable
early developers, but which have become little more than a cargo
cult.
My code is hard to read, it is said (on dit). In a sense, it is. I
find it hard to read at times myself.
#i find hard my code only at first see
#but if i think about it, i find it readable and easy
#
#if my code is hard it is because do complex things.
#if i have one problem is how to traslate one complex problem
#to his little one problems, but now i think not have it too
An entire story exists in the cargo cult of the programmer who is in
some versions of the story "too clever by half" and in others only
thinks he is, and who writes an enormous program that nobody can
figure out.
#people not understand because someone has experience of some language
#some routines, that other people not have
The social function of the story is to normalize
differences in ability, and to cover up the fact that many companies
try to solve ill-defined and very hard problems with computers, often
in order to exploit their workers or cheat customers. It omits the
existence of real code written by ordinary members of the white collar
proletariat which solved in an unsung fashion a hard problem...such as
the assembler for the 8K IBM 1401 that was written by a Univ of Chi
graduate student that put the IBM assembler to shame.
When looking for work in the 1990s, I answered an ad from Rockwell-
Wescom, a telecom manufacturer in Chicago. During my interview, the
manager said "some guy many years ago figured out how to use our call
data to reconstruct calls by simulating the PBX: he was pretty
strange." I said, "that was me". I'd become a legend of the dreamtime.
I didn't get a job because, the manager said, I was "too good to be
true". There had to be something wrong with a guy who'd solved a
problem nobody else could solve but was looking for work in his
forties.
Whereas at a shipping conference in 2003 I was greeted with
recognition by the staff of a shipbuilding firm for whom I'd created a
key program in the 1980s. This was because their culture was one of
openness and trust, not myth, and it's important that at the
conference, they said that they weren't bothering to bid for work in
Iraq. It was an ethical firm, of the sort that is in my experience
rare.
Code in some instance might look challenging because the problem is
actually a bit hard.
#and so the code for that problem could be hard
Likewise it was hard for NASA engineers to solve
the problem of O-ring temperatures in cold temperatures in the
Challenger space shuttle, and later for them to solve the problem of
foam insulation dropping off Columbia at launch.
"They say it couldn't be done. So, I didn't do it."
In a post-Enlightenment culture of real science that has sifted down
to low-level technicians distinguished only by their conformity,
passive-aggression, frightened political conservatism (or passive-
aggressive "libertarianism") and/or religious Fundamentalism, the
#yes possible i'm fundamentalist, when i convince myself of something
#it is not easy change idea for what say other when no code is show
former science (including Dijkstra's misinterpreted admonitions
concerning simplicity and "the humble programmer") become a cargo cult
of excuses for normalized deviance.
#to program, some time, is not easy and one has to be humble always
#because exist always that 90% that is better of me
#and each one has his/her way for write and for resolve problems
#and that way of resolve can not be simulated in another one people
In a recent collection of writings on popular music by my fat pal
Theodore Adorno, he sets out the contrast starkly between classical
and popular music, and this is applicable to programming.
Popular music, he wrote, seems free and liberating, but in actuality
is almost always oversimplified in structure (and this is still true
of pop music years after he wrote it). The dissonances and syncopation
rely for their effect, he wrote, on the fact that for the listener
they are not actual artistic and standalone statements, but instead
sardonic POINTERS (references) back to classical music, light
classical music, and more traditional pop music.
The pop composer, even Irving Berlin or Copland, relies for his effect
on a backreference which says inside the music "listen, I flatted that
note, but you can if you like normalize my deviance by treating what I
said as unserious".
Consider the difference between Phillip Glass or Ygor Stravinsky on
the one hand, and Alban Berg on the other. The audience, according to
a 1980s Time magazine article about Glass, happily "sighed" when
Glass's cheap backreferences to the most innocuous classical music
with an easy-listening rock beat started to drone. Likewise, the
anxious bourgeois applauded Stravinsky (and Picasso) in the 1920s when
they reverted to classical models by means of snarky backreferences
with just enough dissonance to make the audience feel hip.
Whereas Beethoven meant to write the entire symphony in such a way
that ANY change would damage the whole (whereas my formatting and
naming conventions are not something I can willingly discard). (I
really felt for Tom Hulce's Amadeus in the eponymous movie when he was
told to discard notes by the Emperor).
<snip>
(... and no, not an intentional one. Which is embarassing,