Apples and oranges. Seebach is "no Edsger Dijkstra" because it was
clear from "C: The Complete Nonsense" that he was unable to organize a
document, separating important from unimportant issues.
Since you're interested in philosophy, you will be fascinated to note
that it is very hard to determine whether or not you have knowledge of
the above.
Consider the common assertion that knowledge is "justified true belief".
A man looks out into a field while passing it in a train, and sees something;
he believes there is a sheep in the field, because he has seen a fluffy white
thing. But in fact, what he saw was an unusually shaped white rock. But!
Behind the rock, completely invisible to him, is a smallish sheep.
Does he have knowledge of the sheep? Probably not.
The relevance of this is that your "criticisms" of the CTCN page have
been consistently found to be rambling, incoherent, or just plain wrong...
And yet, by total coincidence, I think it's safe to say that you're quite
right that, back when I wrote it, I was unable to organize a document,
separating important from unimportant issues. (That said, I would also
point out that I was making no attempt to do so; I picked issues I found
interesting or informative, and they were presented strictly in page
order.)
I don't care if he's "gay". Turing was gay. But it is astonishing to
me that he doesn't appear to have a complete degree, did not finish
high school or equivalent, and, above all, that he did not ever take a
computer science class. In short, he'd never functioned meaningfully
within a community of knowers.
You seem to have missed a key point: What makes you think I don't have
a complete degree? I completed all but a couple of requirements of math
and philosophy degrees, and *did* complete a psychology degree. I functioned
fairly adequately in college -- quite well if you make allowances for the
fact that, at the time, we had no idea that I had a learning disability, nor
any clue how to treat it or accommodate it. Life has since improved.
Instead, he seems to have been selected
to work on the standard based on his "genius"
No.
There is no "selected to". I wanted to, it sounded fun, people in the
standards community knew me and said I should try it out, so I did. There's
no selection; you pay your dues and show up (or don't show up, if you don't
want to).
(an artifact in part of
avoiding, apart from participation in a community of knowers, the very
real bullshit that also exists in academia) and his willingness based
on his lack of academic experience to go along with vendor
requirements.
The latter is a great example of something which isn't knowledge, because
it is neither true nor justified. There simply is no history of wanting
people to "go along with vendor requirements". During the entire time I
worked on C, we consistently had non-vendors present and active in the
process, and they were listened to carefully, because vendors wanted to make
sure they didn't screw their users by not being aware of user requirements.
In short, what actually happened was the opposite of what you describe.
He was in some sense a *tabula rasa* who could be
counted on to shoehorn language in bureaucratic containers, and, in
corporate style, personalize issues as in the case of Schildt, who has
a COMPLETE undergraduate degree in philosophy, and a Master's degree
in computer fucking science.
Your assertion that this was "personalized" fascinates me, because I was
unaware of any personal aspect to the thing.
However. You raise an interesting concern. You have pointed out in
the past a belief that people like me had "AP'd out of" early CS courses,
and overspecialized later, leading to a disconnected ivory-tower view
of things, uninformed by significant awareness of the sorts of things
one picks up earlier in a CS program.
What, then, should we make of someone who apparently skipped over most of
undergraduate CS entirely, and came in only at the master's degree level,
which is purely academic? Possibly that doesn't tell us anything. But what
if that person then demonstrates a total unawareness that systems other
than MS Windows may have genuinely different architectures? Why, then
I think we're starting to see signs of an ivory tower academic whose lack
of real-world experience hurts his ability.
Furthermore, your "reasoning" shows no awareness of time dimension
whatsoever. In Korporate style, you reason that if it's a Rule it must
have always been a Rule (Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania
in 1984, "we have always done it this way".
If you wanted to say "anyone who doesn't have a degree in CS, but attended
college at a time when they were generally available", you should have. And
as noted, my college didn't have CS degrees when I attended, although they
had one of the earlier CS programs.
This is the wikipedia legend, fostered historically by the fact that
in business data processing, companies wanted the appearance of
accurate computation without its reality insofar as the reality would
interfere with profits. For this reason, it has been said repeatedly
that computer science is worthless as a degree, mostly by people who
don't have such a degree. If they are retained in jobs with fat
salaries, they reason that they know their jobs, but it's clear to me
that you don't.
I don't think anyone's claimed that CS is "worthless" as a degree, merely
that it's not strictly necessary. I might well be more effective in some
ways if I had a CS degree. However, it's unclear that the benefit would
justify the time sink.
So brain surgery should be performable by you? Right...
Who would you rather have representing you in court, assuming it were legal
for both to do so?
* Someone who is one course short of a law degree, but who loves to read
case histories and competed in national debate tournaments.
* Orly Taitz, who has a law degree.
-s
