Warning to newbies

[gwowen]

Actually, it's much more the other way around.

Oh, definitely. You are more sinned against than sinner. But there is
no point in trying to reason with him about it. He's does not appear
to be amenable reason.

 

[Kaz Kylheku]

[...]

The C standard is not science. It does not claim to be science, let
alone "bogus" science. You are therefore talking about things that do
not exist. In that context, I believe the minotaurs should abandon C
for VB, and then you may focus on something constructive.

Indeed, I would never have thought of it as being "science".

The only reason you know how to do that is because the language allows
you to.

Perhaps more importantly, there are many cases in which better optimizations
are possible if you allow the order of some operations to vary, because you
know that you don't care about the difference -- but it may not be possible
for the compiler to know that you don't care.

The compiler knows that an expression that works directly with
declared objects doesn't care about order.

The troublesome cases involve objects accessed through pointers,
where optimizations may become invalid when values
are aliased.

E.g. (*p) = (*q)++ is well-defined if p != q, but
undefined if p == q. With the standard's blessing, the compiler
doesn't have to care about the p == q case, and optimize
as if p != q. If evaluation order is imposed, this freedom
is lost; the compiler can no longer optimize on
the assumption that p != q.

But as of C99, there are restrict pointers. It's possible to impose
strict ordering such that (*p) = (*q)++ normally has defined semantics
even in the case p == q; yet the program can express ``order doesn't
matter'' by using restrict on p and q. Then, the semantics
changes: optimization can proceed on the p != q assumption, since the
behavior of the expression is once again undefined for p == q.

I believe that the optimization argument in favor of unspecified
evaluation orders is fairly weak to begin with, and that local
declarative mechanisms like restrict pointers basically squash it.

 

[spinoza1111]

I'm sure he's not an intentional troll. He's sincere in what he
espouses.  He really believes he's a genius, a philanthropist, an
artist, etc. And that you and Heathfield are monstrously evil. He's
Don Quixote, but not so charming.

But what that means to us is that he cannot be reformed, there is no
point in even trying to argue with him regarding any of his many wacky
conspiracy theories. Waging flame wars on Usenet is the only method of
social interaction he has left. Obviously he's ended up teaching in a
cram school in Asia because they'll take any warm body with an
American passport, after making himself unemployable in any other
profession  by his inability to interact with people in a civil way.
Young children are unthreatening to his ego so he's probably quite
pleasant to them. Clever teenagers though might be a problem.

I can't stop you, of course, from narrating things in this way. I
would say that there's a lot of psychological transference.

If you work in corporate computing, this probably means that you are
the least "minimally competent candidate" for your job, because
computing and even embedded systems is a pure cost center. You may be
encouraged to fantasize that you are an independent professional and
creative artist, but you're not. Development of a truly cutting edge
product requires marshalling the work of others to an insane degree,
therefore the "artist" is now also a complete thug like Steve Jobs
who's not only adept at imagining new products (which many people are)
but also good at being a bully. This is evident from the complexity of
a truly disruptive product like the iPad. It's not the sort of thing a
Wozniak could do on a bench alone.

Truly competent people have I'd guess long since left your company
since my father was right: you only need to code it once. There was
never any intent to create a race of superior intellects who would
program the same things over and over, and such a race does not exist.
Instead, there's a race of Morlocks and machine tenders who resemble
the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz.

I escaped the troop of monkeys singing yo he ho and this bugs you,
Bubba.

 

[spinoza1111]

I have plenty of counterexamples, but let's face it, you aren't
interested.

Not really. I worked in corporations. The last time I had truly
intelligent co-workers (including Whit Diffie and Bob Gaskins, the
inventor of power point) was in 1982. These people fled Bell Northern
Research when BNR hired creeps in 1983. In 1986, the HR director
observed to me that when these new hires left, they mostly left IT as
well. I could see that they were simply unqualified to get jobs
elsewhere in Silicon Valley.

Most of the real work of the world is done by the self-employed and
the so-called unskilled. The latter master real skills (cf the
American socialist writer Barbara Ehrenreich and her book Nickel and
Dimed) of juggling multiple minimum wage jobs and family
responsibilities, and the actual difficult labor of real janitorial
and food service jobs, in ways that corporate types could not imagine.

Most of us who like to program have in my own experience wound up
creating tools to keep ourselves occupied while the user figures out
what the user wants, which is usually wildly at variance with what's
objectively needed. For example, at Princeton, whilst waiting for the
strategic team to figure out meeting agendas, I wrote a complete
parser generator and published a paper on it simply to keep sane:
Princeton's information centers were loosely run on corporate lines.

English isn't my first language, so I'm grateful for any and all
learning opportunities you're willing to provide me with, Grammatical
Father Figure.

Your point about "altruistic" (what?) corporations is interesting.
Care to do some research and present it to us? A Powerpoint
presentation would do just fine. 45 slides bare minimum. Assume an
illiterate viewing crowd.

I was saying there's no such thing.

You're always assuming, trying to present yourself as wise or
insightful, but you're really not.

How would you know? The crowd of peasants with pitchforks and torches
always assume that they are being lied to because they usually are.

 

[spinoza1111]

This is a strawman version of what it means to have a defined evaluation
order.

In reality, language specifications which define evaluation order do not
typically make ridiculous demands about what has to appear in machine
language in what way.

What order does is it helps to establish what the code /means/; it
doesn't say what the actual machine must /do/ (other than compute
the implied result, and all the visible effects in the implied order).

Actual computations can be significantly reordered even if
abstract computation is strictly ordered.

C in fact has a strict evaluation order among expressions that are
divided by sequence points. Yet, modern compilers aggressively rearrange
computation across these boundaries.

They do so in a way that is completely unlike the C standard. The C
standard allows expressions to have different evaluation orders so
that a "standard" program can give different answers when used with
different "standard" compilers, with the blame and onus placed on the
foolish programmer who forgot the gotcha. This isn't standardization.

For example, the standard doesn't support left to right evaluation of
procedure parameters, as is well known, therefore it is a "mistake" to
use a side effect of an expression to the right of it in a list of
actual parameters. But it's also a mistake to do this to the left
since the evaluation order was made standardly undefined in order to
preserve the profits of vendors, since in the old days, tight code for
procedure call wanted to stack things by proceeding backward in the
parameter list.

This is not what modern compilers do! They rearrange an internal
representation of the source code, or the object code, in a manner
that must must must preserve the mathematical meaning of the code at
all costs.

The belief that unspecified subexpression and side effect order
bolsters optimization is laughably false.

It is indeed. I think we agree. My point was that "optimization" was
an excuse for intellectual fraud in the C standard.

 

[spinoza1111]

I've got a degree in computer science (Computational Science to be
precise) and I don't think it's a science.

Then you need to send the degree back. I for one am sick to death of
people with fancy degrees who hate learning.

 

[Michael Foukarakis]

Not really. I worked in corporations. The last time I had truly
intelligent co-workers (including Whit Diffie and Bob Gaskins, the
inventor of power point) was in 1982. These people fled Bell Northern
Research when BNR hired creeps in 1983. In 1986, the HR director
observed to me that when these new hires left, they mostly left IT as
well. I could see that they were simply unqualified to get jobs
elsewhere in Silicon Valley.

Most of the real work of the world is done by the self-employed and
the so-called unskilled. The latter master real skills (cf the
American socialist writer Barbara Ehrenreich and her book Nickel and
Dimed) of juggling multiple minimum wage jobs and family
responsibilities, and the actual difficult labor of real janitorial
and food service jobs, in ways that corporate types could not imagine.

Most of us who like to program have in my own experience wound up
creating tools to keep ourselves occupied while the user figures out
what the user wants, which is usually wildly at variance with what's
objectively needed. For example, at Princeton, whilst waiting for the
strategic team to figure out meeting agendas, I wrote a complete
parser generator and published a paper on it simply to keep sane:
Princeton's information centers were loosely run on corporate lines.

You haven't worked in all of them. Stating facts by extrapolation is,
at the very least, not accurate. Anyway, I see your train of thought
has flown past creepy nerds to incompetent husbands..interesting (no,
I'm just kidding).

I was saying there's no such thing.

Indeed you were. And I was saying you might want to explain your
methodology and experimental results for discovering their absence in
45 slides. Thanks in advance.

How would you know?

You have provided us with plenty of opportunities that proved you
wrong (among other things).

The crowd of peasants with pitchforks and torches
always assume that they are being lied to because they usually are.

It's in their best interest. They can't handle the truth.

 

[spinoza1111]

You haven't worked in all of them. Stating facts by extrapolation is,

Part of the illusion is in fact that social relations are not held to
be constant, but in fact I worked at somewhat more than the usual
number of corporations, since I job hopped in search of a better deal,
and I found that because the corporation has a fiduciary
responsibility only to make money, it is never (and I mean never)
motivated to do the best job, quite the opposite. This means that it
won't hire the "best" people.

at the very least, not accurate. Anyway, I see your train of thought

Forming a social theory causes us to predict things. It's called
rationality. Rainier Bank in Seattle was said to be a humanistic bank.
It was. I discovered that it was selling itself to Security Pacific in
1986 precisely because its humanistic culture was a cost center.

Capitalism is an inhuman system.

 

[Michael Foukarakis]

Part of the illusion is in fact that social relations are not held to
be constant, but in fact I worked at somewhat more than the usual
number of corporations, since I job hopped in search of a better deal,
and I found that because the corporation has a fiduciary
responsibility only to make money, it is never (and I mean never)
motivated to do the best job, quite the opposite. This means that it
won't hire the "best" people.

Again, extrapolating. You may well be considered nowhere near the
elite in your business, or even competent (this is getting more and
more certain). That does not mean the best people are not employed by
corporations.

I understand that you're ignoring this on purpose, though, because it
does not fit your trolling schedule. I'll play along, pretending to be
talking to someone half-sane. The day is still too slow.

 

[spinoza1111]

Again, extrapolating. You may well be considered nowhere near the
elite in your business, or even competent (this is getting more and
more certain). That does not mean the best people are not employed by
corporations.

Well, part of the deal is that "competence" is redefined as
"submission". In fact, in performance reviews, I was consistently
informed that while I was highly competent at programming, I needed to
learn "teamwork". After many years of research, I discovered that
"teamwork" in the corporation means what Theodore Adorno called "the
authoritarian personality", that person who willingly submits to
power, and cultivates the fine art of taking the anger generated by
his submission on the less powerful.

For example, if I'd been on the C standard team, I would have
concluded that to be truly standardized, C would have to be reformed
semantically. "Undefined" constructs would have to be discarded.
Actual parameters in parameter lists would have had to be evaluated
from left to right so that actual C programmers, using "my" standard,
could have used the comma in such lists orthogonally with respect to
the comma operator.

But this would have implied that vendors would have had to rehire
compiler developers who'd been enthusiastically laid off, and at that
point the suits would have regarded me as a trouble-maker. They would
have worked behind the scenes to have the "senior techs" (usually the
fattest and most hirsute) present to me a variety of bogus reasons why
the old way needed to be retained, such as "an undefined result is
easier to optimize", something which Kaz here seems also to regard,
along with me, as a bald-faced lie.

I would have stood my ground. But this is "bad teamwork".

The best people are NOT employed by corporations.

 

[Colonel Harlan Sanders]

Well, part of the deal is that "competence" is redefined as
"submission". In fact, in performance reviews, I was consistently
informed that while I was highly competent at programming, I needed to
learn "teamwork". After many years of research, I discovered that
"teamwork" in the corporation means what Theodore Adorno called "the
authoritarian personality", that person who willingly submits to
power, and cultivates the fine art of taking the anger generated by
his submission on the less powerful.

Or, as I said, you are incapable of working in a professional manner.

It's clear from how you act in this newsgroup that the concept of
respect for your peers is alien to you.

If you discovered an error in someone else's work, you use it as an
opportunity to crow over them, reminding them and everyone else over
and over of their mistake.

Conversely when anyone points out an error you have made, you
immediately launch an attack on all fronts, denigrating their
education, politics, family, sexuality, upbringing, while reciting
your achievements, your relationship with various famous people, your
machismo, all while completely rejecting even the possibility that you
may indeed be in error.

You can get away with that if you truly are a genius. But evidently
you are not, and so you are cut loose from every job rather than put
up with you. And of course your rationalisation for this is that
everyone who does manage to hold a job down has sold his soul and you
are the last free man; and now you have to demonise not just the
individuals who pissed you off, but everyone who has made a success of
themselves in the field that spat you out, and come here to try to
prove over and over that you are better than all of them.

 

[Charlton Wilbur]

S> I suppose you mean the singular because there is no neuter
S> plural.

"theirs" -- which is not "their's."

Charlton

 

[osmium]

Well, part of the deal is that "competence" is redefined as
"submission". In fact, in performance reviews, I was consistently
informed that while I was highly competent at programming, I needed to
learn "teamwork". After many years of research, I discovered that
"teamwork" in the corporation means what Theodore Adorno called "the
authoritarian personality", that person who willingly submits to
power, and cultivates the fine art of taking the anger generated by
his submission on the less powerful.

For example, if I'd been on the C standard team, I would have
concluded that to be truly standardized, C would have to be reformed
semantically. "Undefined" constructs would have to be discarded.
Actual parameters in parameter lists would have had to be evaluated
from left to right so that actual C programmers, using "my" standard,
could have used the comma in such lists orthogonally with respect to
the comma operator.

But this would have implied that vendors would have had to rehire
compiler developers who'd been enthusiastically laid off, and at that
point the suits would have regarded me as a trouble-maker. They would
have worked behind the scenes to have the "senior techs" (usually the
fattest and most hirsute) present to me a variety of bogus reasons why
the old way needed to be retained, such as "an undefined result is
easier to optimize", something which Kaz here seems also to regard,
along with me, as a bald-faced lie.

I have known and worked with quite a few senior techs and never saw even one
that was fat. Just an observation, in case you are collecting data points
for the various studies you have apparently been doing all your life. A
senior tech (no quotes) is probably older than most of the crew and
certainly gets paid more. My guess is that the quotes you use mean someone
that you don't think *should* be a senior tech, but by some form of
skullduggery has gotten the position.

In my experience "teamwork" is code for what they call, in elementary
school, "works well with others". You will probably not believe this, but
you *can* have different beliefs than the people around you without being
obnoxious.

 

[Richard Bos]

What was Mr. Nash having trouble with?

Billboards.

Richard

 

[Michael Foukarakis]

Well, part of the deal is that "competence" is redefined as
"submission". In fact, in performance reviews, I was consistently
informed that while I was highly competent at programming, I needed to
learn "teamwork". After many years of research, I discovered that
"teamwork" in the corporation means what Theodore Adorno called "the
authoritarian personality", that person who willingly submits to
power, and cultivates the fine art of taking the anger generated by
his submission on the less powerful.


For example, if I'd been on the C standard team, I would have
concluded that to be truly standardized, C would have to be reformed
semantically. "Undefined" constructs would have to be discarded.
Actual parameters in parameter lists would have had to be evaluated
from left to right so that actual C programmers, using "my" standard,
could have used the comma in such lists orthogonally with respect to
the comma operator.

But this would have implied that vendors would have had to rehire
compiler developers who'd been enthusiastically laid off, and at that
point the suits would have regarded me as a trouble-maker. They would
have worked behind the scenes to have the "senior techs" (usually the
fattest and most hirsute) present to me a variety of bogus reasons why
the old way needed to be retained, such as "an undefined result is
easier to optimize", something which Kaz here seems also to regard,
along with me, as a bald-faced lie.

Alternate realities are not among my academic interests. Neither is
alchemy, magic or perfect languages which will solve the world's
problems and spread love at the mere invocation of function FixIt().

I would have stood my ground. But this is "bad teamwork".

You obviously fail at working with others. The best know how to work
with others despite their difference in beliefs, preferences or other
aspects of their personality. Your lack of personality prevents you
from understanding this, so you are trying to compensate by trying to
forcefully convince others that your ways are correct. Of course,
since people generally tend to mock, alienate and kill-switch bullies,
you will not find any fulfillment with that attitude.

The best people are NOT employed by corporations.

Well, you wouldn't know one of the best if he kicked you in the ass.

 

[spinoza1111]

Alternate realities are not among my academic interests. Neither is
alchemy, magic or perfect languages which will solve the world's
problems and spread love at the mere invocation of function FixIt().


You obviously fail at working with others. The best know how to work
with others despite their difference in beliefs, preferences or other
aspects of their personality. Your lack of personality prevents you
from understanding this, so you are trying to compensate by trying to
forcefully convince others that your ways are correct. Of course,
since people generally tend to mock, alienate and kill-switch bullies,
you will not find any fulfillment with that attitude.

Canned corporate nonsense. Actually, people are by nature very good at
working with others. It's the corporation that sets them at odds, and
then selects the bullies for leadership. The bullies gradually learn
to believe in nothing except power-over-others.

Can you seriously maintain that the regs here are sterling examples of
teamwork? Seebach refused to accept McGraw Hill's offer of a job in
correcting Schildt and preferred to file a libelous and silly document
("the 'heap' is a DOS term"). Heathfield and Kiki think they've
"killfiled" people when they engage in behavior that would get them
tapped on the shoulder, spun around, and punched out in meatspace:
that is, talking trash about others behind their back but within their
hearing.

Let's call a spade a spade, shall we? Corporate "team players" were in
fact named in the 1940s by a groundbreaking sociological study, The
Authoritarian Personality by one Theodore Adorno. These are people who
quickly learn where power is in a situation, and without wondering
about truth or the legitimacy of power, suck up to representatives of
power, and take their anger out by bullying people identified as
trying to stand outside power.

These are the real bullies, not people who like me stick to cases,
responding only in self-defense.

Well, you wouldn't know one of the best if he kicked you in the ass.

I did find any number of people with reputations as "experts" whose
"expertise" was bogus, whereas I recognized Whit Diffie and Bob
Gaskins as true experts precisely because they had outside interests
and were approachable.

What's unacceptable to the corporate "team player" is what was
unacceptable to Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. If
you in fact go along to get along, suck up and bully, you're not a
man. If you never take an unpopular stand, you're a dork.

People are told here to "ask questions". But these questions aren't
even answered properly in most cases. People are told here to "ask
questions" because the regs are to be flattered at all costs.
Heathfield makes an honest attempt, inside his limitations, to answer
questions but doesn't do a very good job. Seebach prefers to talk
about himself and how cute his ADHD is.

 

[spinoza1111]

    S> I suppose you mean the singular because there is no neuter
    S> plural.

"theirs" -- which is not "their's."

It's not neuter. It has no gender, and can be used for any assortment
of beings. Whereas "it" is neuter. "Their's" is a misspelled "there's"
as in "there is".

"Theirs" is predicative possessive and is non-neuter, non-masculine,
and non-feminine.

It also has a new grammatical role, quite novel, since in an attempt
to be gender-neutral, "their" is attributive possessive SINGULAR
ungendered but non-neuter and "theirs" is predicative possessive
SINGULAR ungendered but non-neuter:

Each student will bring their copy of the textbook to class, or else.
Bob and Mary will take what is theirs.

These new constructions, which are used by educated native speakers
today, replace

Each student will bring his or her copy of the textbook to the class,
or else.
Bob will take what is his. Mary will take what is hers.

Each student will take what is theirs
Everybody has their share of care
Grammaticians like to split hairs
Speakers rush where angels to tread don't dare.

 

[spinoza1111]

spinoza1111wrote:



I have known and worked with quite a few senior techs and never saw even one
that was fat. Just an observation, in case you are collecting data points
for the various studies you have apparently been doing all your life.  A
senior tech (no quotes) is probably older than most of the crew and
certainly gets paid more.  My guess is that the quotes you use mean someone
that you don't think *should* be a senior tech, but by some form of
skullduggery has gotten the position.

In my experience "teamwork" is code for what they call, in elementary
school, "works well with others".  You will probably not believe this, but
you *can* have different beliefs than the people around you without being
obnoxious.

Not after they've drunk the Korporate Kool Ade.

 

[John Bode]

[snipping article because, really, there's no point]

You know, Nilges does serve a purpose; the more rant threads he
starts, the farther the spam gets pushed down on the front page*. It
doesn't do anything for the S/N ratio, but at least the first thing I
see *isn't* a steady stream of ads for knock-offs, drugs, and naked
Slavic women.

* Yes, I'm one of those benighted individuals using Google Groups, but
only because I can't install a dedicated news client on my work
machine and because trying to read Usenet from home always devolves
into an exercise in rage management; all that bandwidth does exactly
dick if you can't connect to a goddamned server in the first place.
GG sucks, but it's better than nothing at all.

 

[spinoza1111]

Or, as I said, you are incapable of working in a professional manner.

One of George Orwell's lesser known, but important, rules for writing
in Politics and the English Language:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are
used to seeing in print.

I'd generalize this, but only slightly. Don't even use phrases of > 1
words which you are used to seeing in print.

"Working in a professional manner" is an example; it is Human
Resources boilerplate.

"Does not work in a professional manner" usually means "fails to know
his place in the scheme of things".

You see, unlike many corporate "professionals" I had a genuinely
professional father, and his "professional manner" was to force his
views, as a doctor, down other people's throats.

Whereas I discovered that "working in a professional manner" in
corporate data processing meant being subservient to the boss even
when the boss wanted something absurd and counterfactual.

It's clear from how you act in this newsgroup that the concept of
respect for your peers is alien to you.

I have no respect it is true for Peter Seebach. Why? Because he's
bragged that he's never taken a computer science class in his life
despite the fact that this aporia caused him to make absurd claims and
inferences, including "the 'heap' is a DOS term", forbidding Schildt
to explain runtime using a stack, and fantasizing that windows and
linux use different models for multitasking when both must use some
variant of a semaphore. Furthermore, he calls people, out of the blue
and without a previous history, vile names. He wants to be tolerated
as a gay man and as having a fashionable disease, but bullies and
disrespects others like a common fagbasher and mocks them as mentally
disordered in preference to answering their objections.

I have no respect it is true for Richard Heathfield. Apart from a
certain integrity on minor matters, Heathfield talks about people to
others like a boor and makes absurd claims based on searching
comp.risks digest titles for people's names, and reporting no hits as
proof that people are lying about their background.

I have no respect it is true for Keith Thompson. This is because he
constantly claims to killfile individuals but reserves the right to
call them names.

I regard none of these people as my peers. I regard them as my
inferiors.

If you discovered an error in someone else's work, you use it as an
opportunity to crow over them, reminding them and everyone else over
and over of their mistake.

I don't know what you are talking about. You are in fact describing
Heathfield and Seebach.

Conversely when anyone points out an error you have made, you
immediately launch an attack on all fronts, denigrating their
education, politics, family, sexuality, upbringing, while reciting
your achievements, your relationship with various famous people, your
machismo, all while completely rejecting even the possibility that you
may indeed be in error.

You look idly at a mass of postings without seeing their temporal
relationships and become what you describe.

You can get away with that if you truly are a genius. But evidently
you are not, and so you are cut loose from every job rather than put

No, in fact I stayed with all of them until receiving a better offer,
until I took a sabbatical in 2003 to write my book and live on
savings.

up with you. And of course your rationalisation for this is that
everyone who does manage to hold a job down has sold his soul and you
are the last free man; and now you have to demonise not just the
individuals who pissed you off, but everyone who has made a success of
themselves in the field that spat you out, and come here to try to
prove over and over that you are better than all of them.

The mere computer programmer who had the bad taste to take the Sixties
seriously has long been mythologized as having a "bad attitude" for
the same reason DeGaulle had his cops beat protesting students in
Paris in 1968. To function at all, modern society needs a complaisant
class of technicians. As it happened, it was a mistake for me to join
that class (in my book, "Build Your Own .Net Compiler and Language", I
am perfectly open about this, and I describe my career in computing as
an elaborate draft-dodging scheme that got out of hand). This is
because I demanded more than my "fair share" of autonomy in return for
16 hour days and the ruin of my marriage as a direct result of 16 hour
days, and while I could get money, I could not get any autonomy
whatsoever.

So knock yourself out. I'm the person your manager warned you about.