In the matter of Herb Schildt: the question of a "bad" book

[Willem]

Kenny McCormack wrote:
) In article <[email protected]>,
)>spinoza1111 wrote:
)>
)>> For example, can you refute my argument
)>
)>It's a bit hard to refute something which was never made. Your post
)>consists of nothing more than
)>idiocy, a series of puerile insults and a set of personal attacks.
)
) I take it, that's a 'no' then, dear?

Of course.
You can't refute an argument that's Not Even Wrong.
Duh.


SaSW, Willem
--
Disclaimer: I am in no way responsible for any of the statements
made in the above text. For all I know I might be
drugged or something..
No I'm not paranoid. You all think I'm paranoid, don't you !
#EOT

 

[Seebs]

Of course.
You can't refute an argument that's Not Even Wrong.

This is largely true, but not entirely true. With a great deal of effort
and time, it's certainly possible to walk someone through the demonstration
that something is Not Even Wrong.

If someone wants to send me a copy of the argument Nilges wants refuted,
I'll happily post a detailed discussion of it elsewhere.

-s

 

[Seebs]

If people are being asked to take these comments elsewhere,
it seems only fair to ask that you stop talking about said
person here also. Doesn't it?

Why, yes. I'm in fact doing so -- I've posted several responses to his
humorous writings, but *not here*.

He can either show up there or not. No skin off my nose either way.

-s

 

[Colonel Harlan Sanders]

It's called self-defense, ASSHOLE. Heathfield started this shit ten
years ago, and I'm going to finish it. I'm willing at all times to
have a sensible discussion, even disagreement. But I have to deal with
redneck morons like you.

So because you had an argument with Heathfield 10 years ago, you are
justified in vilifying Seebach and calling me an asshole, in "self
defense". Of course, we're all mindless minions of Heathfield, so that
makes sense.

It did say "Programming and Coding for Digital Computers". It did not
say "Programming and Coding for the IBM 7000 Series". The IBM 1401 was
a digital computer. By your redneck/Fascist logic, it was bad, since
its exemplary computer was the IBM 7094, with a completely different
architecture.

Your logic, your supposition, your conclusion, and you're the Fascist.

And learn to read, REDNECK. I didn't say Sherman was "bad".

Okay, NIGGLER, you said:

"Intelligent people make good use of "bad" books.
For example, I used Sherman's "Programming and
Coding for Digital Computers",

Silly me for assuming that the example related to the previous
sentence. I should have realised that "intelligent person" would then
have referred to you, so clearly the sentences are unrelated. Thanks
for pointing that out.

I said
that because I'd already had the rudiments of humanist education, I
made it serve my purposes by understanding EVEN THEN that computers
came in Baskin and Robbins 32 different flavors.

Wow, I never knew that there was more than one kind of computer. Shows
how my educamacashun is deficient.

I never complained to the prof. I kept the textbook. I never, until
now, even raised the issue, and here I've raised it to show that
intelligent people make use of books in such a way that the concept of
"bad" book doesn't occur to them.

It didn't occur to anyone at all to call it a "bad book". So it is
totally irrelevant.

Sherman and Schildt "made it real" by example. But according to
Dweebach's completely fucked-up logic, Sherman sucked because he
didn't cover all possible architectures which even at the time were
quite different.

Hey, your straw man is on fire. Quick, spew some more abuse over it .

**** you, racist asshole.

Racist? Your transference is showing.
I am referring to you and your niggling personality.
I could come up with something more colorful. But Niggler is nice and
specific.

 

[spinoza1111]

spinoza1111 a écrit :


What you fail to understand is that this group is about C. You can't discuss about
ANYTHING just because everything is linked to everything else in this universe.

No, unless there is a moral reason for the linkage. In fact, the
Vietnam war was linked to computer science when I took my first
computer science class, because IBM mainframes were being used to
massage meaningless "body counts". The professor allowed some time to
discuss whether we'd use our skills for the war or against it.

I understand this can be taken to far. For example, I agree that
Theodore Adorno had the right to call the police in Frankfurt in order
to arrest students that wanted him to stop teaching completely about
the Baroque and focus exclusively on a war in which West Germany was
not even involved.

You have to make a difficult judgement in each case based on morality
and that judgement as in Sartre defines who you are; if you appear to
others to be a butthead then you have to accept this. To me, the
Stalinist students who disrupted Adorno's classes were thugs, in fact
the same sort as the regs here.

As you have noticed, effective technical discussion doesn't stand a
chance here. I'm saying that this is because people value computers
more than human accomplishment or reputation or effort (as witness the
programmer who works 18 hours to get it done, and is not thanked but
condemned for getting it done late, a drama repeated often), technical
discussions dissolve into personal attack and necessary self-defense.

The key is that Seebach is so unqualified in his profession that he
should not be allowed to silence you, or myself, because both you and
me have more to offer, just as Adorno had more to offer.

Yes, everything is related to everything else. The only sensible way
of telling whether to bring up a novel topic and relate it to the
focus is based on human needs. For example, "underarm deodorant" was
"unrelated" to the South Pole...before we discovered in the 1970s that
the long-chain molecules released by "underarm deodorant" were
stripping the ozone layer over the South Pole.

The atoms of your body came from dying stars, that manufactured the carbon and the other ingredients
of your organic soup. It is bad taste to discuss about astronomy in a group dedicated to medicine
however!

My father would start practical medical lectures, and cover the
material, while starting with reference to Aristotle and Galen,
because he felt that the morality of care in their texts was still
relevant even if their science was out of date. American physicians
didn't like this; but physicians from India did.

C is related to the wider view of the data processing economics. Software, as you may know, is like
the textile industry: it needs FASHION.

Here in Paris the textile industry created Vogue and other magazines, to promote FASHION. This
allowed them to convice people of throwing away that perfectly functioning shirt to make place for
the new, more FASHIONABLE one.

Have you read Barthes?

This repeats itself with the computer languages FASHION. C is old fashioned, out. C++ is going out
of fashion too. C# is more fashionable because Sun (and Java) went belly up and were swallowed by
Oracle.

Actually, the best Parisian fashion designers were genuinely concerned
about wearable and comfortable clothes. Likewise, object orientation
and garbage collection free up the programmer to solve real problems
faster.

There are "Fashion makers", those who decide what is "in" and what is "out". There are also, real
concerns, like the fact that beginning with a certain degree of complexity, programming languages
implode because of their own weight. With fashion is the same. With some baroque clothes the women
couldn't possible move freeely, there were problems if you want to take a car, or (god forbid) take
the proletarian Metro. Those clothes went the same way that C++ is going....

C++ is going to hell not because it was fashionable, but because it
allows programmers to preserve bad habits (such as Seebach's
unstructured switch()). As to the greater complexity of the .Net or
Java environments: the same arguments were made against the first
compilers. Very few people here can master complexity apart from you
because they are programmers only in name, but in fact we know how to
create good garbage collectors and need not, with all due respect,
reinvent the wheel. The garbage collector may run slower, but Moore's
Law applies.

We could discuss about this here, but you have never even mentioned this, the REAL economic context,
besides some slogans that you throw around.

I think C is a GOOD language, maybe because I detest fashion and "old fashioned" stuff makes it even
more interesting for me. I prefer simplicity and power, two things that modern languages avoid like
the pest.

The simplicity, with all due respect, is merely your pleasure in
mastery and your dislike of the loss of self-esteem that accompanies
learning something new.

Since I like C, I am trying to put up a standard container library for it, a project that I discuss
regularly in this group.

Apparently (besides answering some newbee questions that are marked as off topic by the regs) you
think that discussing that irrelevant book of Schild is THE thema that we should all love.

Yes, until the harm done Schildt is redressed, because people matter
infinitely more than computers. And wait a minute: how is it that a
practical book on C, no matter its quality, "irrevelant"? It seems to
me that you are being equally driven *par votre goût*, or if you
prefer, by ultimately moral considerations of scientific asceticism. I
agree that scientific asceticism is good, but more important is
redressing harm done a person.

 

[spinoza1111]

This whole discussion of what is relevant is nonsense:

1. Hatred is always on topic as far as pond scum posters like the
Colonel are concerned: their hatred is the Spam of this newsgroup

2. This ng is deluged with commercial offers but still gets C
discussed

3. The ability to relate a computer science topic to something outside
of bits and bytes is taken by normal people as a good thing

4. The sheer incompetence AT C of the regs, esp. Seebach, is most
significant

 

[Malcolm McLean]

A book claiming to be a biography of Winston Churchill, which omitted any
mention of World War II, would be a bad book.  A book claiming to be a study
of Winston Churchill's childhood, which omitted any mention of World War
II, might or might not be bad -- I'd think they might want to refer to how
childhood events might have influenced later events, but if it really was
just about his childhood, well, WWII didn't happen then, so it's outside the
scope of the book.

We use the term "book", however besides their physical construction,
and the fact that they contain information, a lot of books have hardly
anything in common with each other. There's not much point in
discussing whether "C the complete reference" and "Mein Kampf" are
equally "bad" books, for instance. Their purpose is entirely
different.

The vast majority of books on C are ephemeral pedagogical material.
They don't have any particular literary or philosophical merit, and
the skill lies in the styling and attractive presentation of content.
The publishers intend to print a few versions, then move on to other
things. It's accepted that the books will become obsolete when
technology changes.

Serious books, however, almost by definition pass the test of time.
It's rather uneducated to dismiss a serious book out of hand. Only a
very few books out of the tens of thousands written make it into the
class of "serious lityerature", however. We get the opposite
impression because the scores of Victorian sailing adventures and the
like have disappeared, whilst Dickens and Hardy and the Brontes remain
available.

 

[spinoza1111]

We use the term "book", however besides their physical construction,
and the fact that they contain information, a lot of books have hardly
anything in common with each other. There's not much point in
discussing whether "C the complete reference" and "Mein Kampf" are
equally "bad" books, for instance. Their purpose is entirely
different.

The vast majority of books on C are ephemeral pedagogical material.
They don't have any particular literary or philosophical merit, and
the skill lies in the styling and attractive presentation of content.
The publishers intend to print a few versions, then move on to other
things. It's accepted that the books will become obsolete when
technology changes.

Serious books, however, almost by definition pass the test of time.
It's rather uneducated to dismiss a serious book out of hand. Only a
very few books out of the tens of thousands written make it into the
class of "serious lityerature", however. We get the opposite
impression because the scores of Victorian sailing adventures and the
like have disappeared, whilst Dickens and Hardy and the Brontes remain
available.

Wise words. But does this not imply, Malcolm, that making such a great
foofaraw and whoop dee doo about Schildt's being a "bad" book is just
nonsense? And even if he isn't Tolstoy, the guy retains a right to
privacy!

Dweebach had three choices:

1. Discuss in the abstract how Microsoft is a hostile environment for
C programming, which it is.

2. Write "I didn't like Schildt's book". This was Steve Summit's
approach. He liked Schildt's early work including the C interpreter,
but wanted Schildt to code for the 68000. Schildt joined the Dark Side
and this soured Steverino. But Summit reviewed each book one at a
time, and never made such wild claims as has little Peter. Peter went
at warp speed from a couple of errors to a global claim about a book
which he allowed to amplify to a global claim about Schildt. Peter
could have said "I didn't like CTCR" but no...

3. Make a Federal case out of Schildt's Terrible, Horrible, No Good,
Very Bad Book (with apologies to Judith Viorst, author of Alexander
and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day) without having the
education or programming ability to make a credible case

He chose (3).

Besides, I have scuttled in the heat of Asia to meet poor students who
just want to learn English, and they have a great deal of respect even
for crummy books. The contempt for a "bad" book here is a contempt for
books and a lack of understanding, charity, and, in Dweebach's case,
attention span.

 

[eric]

* PAID and QUALIFIED book reviewers who read books they do not like
out of intellectual honesty and moral seriousness, such as Sydney
Hook, who in 1962 read Ayn Rand's "Notes for the New Intellectual"
from cover to cover and demolished her in a New York Times review.
Note that Hook *knows" that NFTNI sucks whereas I believe, based on
dipping into Rand's crap and Hook's review, that she sucks. BUT I DO
NOT CALL NFTNI A BAD BOOK.

Of course, the fact that you left out that Hook was a Marxist or
Communist and that the NY Times, also a pro communist rag, published his
crap does not bring any credibility to his arguments or yours.

Communism has been shown over and over again that it does not work in
the real world. How many more people do you think the pro-commies need
to kill before you except that fact.

Eric

 

[spinoza1111]

This is largely true, but not entirely true.  With a great deal of effort
and time, it's certainly possible to walk someone through the demonstration
that something is Not Even Wrong.

It's also possible to demonstrate that something is Not Even
Understood.

If someone wants to send me a copy of the argument Nilges wants refuted,
I'll happily post a detailed discussion of it elsewhere.

Your pompous counterexample about Winston Churchill shows that in
addition to being uneducated in computer science AND a horrible
programmer, you are also completely uncultivated in the humanities:
for in the movie Young Winston, a filmic "biography", his adventures
after his maiden speech in Parliament are omitted. Furthermore, when
he has a dream at Chartwell in the film about his father Randolph
Churchill, he omits to tell his father about any of his political or
military accomplishments and says instead that he paints pictures.

Germaine Greer recently published a biography of Shakespeare's wife
Anne Hathaway, making up incidents and cheerfully admitting that there
is almost nothing for the biographer in the form of sources.

Malcolm correctly points out that computer books are tools,
doorstoppers and boat anchors in my words after their sell-by date.
But this means that from the standpoint of common decency, Schildt's
reputation, peace of mind, and standing in his community are more
important than easily rectified errors.

 

[Nick Keighley]

Neither of them has any particular interest in the idea of truth as a
quality a statement could have independent of its personal convenience
to them.  Nilges is obsessed with his reputation for its own sake, while
Kenny appears to be obsessed with his reputation in terms of how it can
give him power, but they're otherwise frighteningly similar.  I think
Kenny's less likely to go sufficiently insane to get committed, though.

I think you over-estimate peoples' interest in power. I don't think
Kenny wants (or expects) to gain power by posting to the internet
(sounds nuts as soon as you say it). I think he just likes "yanking
peoples' chain".

I doubt either of them will get committed, they seem quite able to
function in the real world. And there are enough *really* crazy people
in the world to fill the available asylums.

 

[spinoza1111]

Of course, the fact that you left out that Hook was a Marxist or
Communist and that the NY Times, also a pro communist rag, published his
crap does not bring any credibility to his arguments or yours.

ROTFFLMFAO

Sydney Hook was by 1962 a leading neoconservative and one of the
founding fathers of modern American conservatism, along with Reagan
and William F. Buckley. Like many thoughtful people in the 1930s, Hook
was appalled by the Stalinist show trials of that decade and became a
conservative for that reason, just as Reagan, a liberal union man in
the 1940s, became a conservative in reaction to Stalinists who were
infiltrating Hollywood unions.

Do your homework, Tea Bag.

Communism has been shown over and over again that it does not work in
the real world.  How many more people do you think the pro-commies need
to kill before you except that fact.

How many good socialists and communists, such as Salvador Allende, are
YOU gonna kill, punk?

 

[Seebs]

I think you over-estimate peoples' interest in power. I don't think
Kenny wants (or expects) to gain power by posting to the internet
(sounds nuts as soon as you say it). I think he just likes "yanking
peoples' chain".

Yes. Which is to say, he wants to exercise power over people...

-s

 

[spinoza1111]

I think you over-estimate peoples' interest in power. I don't think
Kenny wants (or expects) to gain power by posting to the internet
(sounds nuts as soon as you say it). I think he just likes "yanking
peoples' chain".

Actually, in my direct experience, high-quality posting to unmoderated
forums can get results. I was invited to an online panel chaired by
Cass Sunstein and including Mike Godwin, and sponsored by Princeton
University Press, solely on the basis of my postings in this dump. I
was interviewed for an ACM film on women and computing based on my
responses on comp.risks on that issue.

The problem is that 99% of posts are quite forgettable, and quality
posts like Navia's, Malcolm's, and Kenny's are ignored.

I doubt either of them will get committed, they seem quite able to
function in the real world. And there are enough *really* crazy people
in the world to fill the available asylums.

The men with the butterfly nets haven't caught me yet.

 

[Tim Streater]

spinoza1111 <[email protected]> wrote:

[more of the same]

Which is why he's a boring toad.

He's very boring to most of us, but apparently not to you.

So's this cold I have right now but that doesn't mean I choose to ignore
it.

Tim, I haven't really kept track, but my impression is that most of
your recent posts have been taunts directed at spinoza1111. Have I
missed something more interesting (i.e., topical) that you've posted?

Nope.

 

[Ben Bacarisse]

The vast majority of books on C are ephemeral pedagogical material.
They don't have any particular literary or philosophical merit, and
the skill lies in the styling and attractive presentation of content.

I find that point of view surprising but it does explain why you have
been reluctant to take a view on the quality of the content.

To be fair, you don't say if the book in question is one of those
ephemeral ones. It has been in print, perpetuating its peculiar view of
C's input functions, for at least 15 years so maybe those parts of it
that did not involve the author's skill are now worthy of consideration.

The publishers intend to print a few versions, then move on to other
things. It's accepted that the books will become obsolete when
technology changes.

I would say that it is possible for books about C (or, indeed, any
technical subject in CS) to be written by authors who apply their skills
to other areas (in addition to the style and presentation). The results
will usually be better books than those produced under the ethos you
describe.

<snip>

 

[Nick Keighley]

On 05/02/2010 05:22 AM, spinoza1111 wrote:

Of course, the fact that you left out that Hook was a Marxist or
Communist and that the NY Times, also a pro communist rag, published his
crap does not bring any credibility to his arguments or yours.

Communism has been shown over and over again that it does not work in
the real world.  How many more people do you think the pro-commies need
to kill before you except that fact.

except? to dismiss?

communism has worked on small scales. There's the Mondragon
cooperatives. There's various halfway houses that correspond to
socialism. Most economies are mixed to some extent. Even the US has
social medicine now...

 

[Keith Thompson]

Nope.

Ok, thanks for the answer.

*plonk*

 

[Malcolm McLean]

I would say that it is possible for books about C (or, indeed, any
technical subject in CS) to be written by authors who apply their skills
to other areas (in addition to the style and presentation).  The results
will usually be better books than those produced under the ethos you
describe.

There's a difference between books on computer science, and books
which document something artificial. A lot of computer books are in
the latter category, including descriptions of how to use various
Windows appliactions, descriptions of chip architecture, and language
primers Since computer technology is constantly changing, these books
tend to go out of date. C is an unusually stable language, but the
problem is that you can't do many of the things you want to do with
just the core language, so often a primer will document a particular
compiler or target platform.

I don't think it is really possible to write a classic that is
essentially a description of someone else's invention. As the Soviets
found with their "production novels", some themes just don't lend
themselves to high art.

 

[Kenny McCormack]

Ok, thanks for the answer.

*plonk*

Welcome to the light side, Tim.

--
(This discussion group is about C, ...)

Wrong. It is only OCCASIONALLY a discussion group
about C; mostly, like most "discussion" groups, it is
off-topic Rorsharch [sic] revelations of the childhood
traumas of the participants...