"SELF" defense does not give you the license to call Heathfield a Nazi
youth in response to an anecdote he told about his teacher, which had
nothing at all to do with you, and of which you have no knowledge at
all to base your accusations.
Nothing has anything to do with anything if an addictive system has no
memory. However, Heathfield's conduct does resemble, as far as I can
tell from (1) my experience here, (2) my experience in SDS in the
1960s, and (3) my reading that of radical left students in the 1960s
and that of Nazi youth in the 1930s.
Of course, you've added some weasel words extending "self defense" to
"collective" which you imagine gives you the right to act on anyone
else's behalf. So you've appointed yourself a free-agent vigilante.
Nope, I just decided to investigate the matter of Schildt, because
when I submitted intelligent and well received comments on programming
professionalism to comp.programming in 2000, about the time I was
invited by Princeton University Press to an online panel on Internet
issues alongside Mike Godwin, I found myself targeted by Richard
Heathfield in a Topic Vendetta in which he said "comp.programming is
not about programmers".
I also noted that Heathfield, the unsuccessful editor of a poorly-
received computer book, had a hair up his ass about the much more
successful Herb Schildt, whose "Born to Code" book I'd read and liked
in 1989, and I decided to investigate the matter. I reasoned that one
way to stop what seemed to be bullying was not only self-defense,
because that would be interpreted as bias. I also had seen bullying
teachers in my high school in the 1960s confronted by my fellow
students, who defended my right to wear black armbands to protest
Vietnam even though many of them hated my guts. I'd seen that
solidarity overcomes bullying, because bullying is how illegitimate
power legitimises itself.
I wasn't particularly impressed by Schildt's work after Born to Code
based on my own experience in assisting Nash, and I did feel he needed
to use a wider range of compilers and platforms. However, I also
realized that by 2000, C had become a mess and that to be truly
encyclopedic about C was nearly impossible. It's not a well-definable
programming language as shown by "sequence points" which are an ugly
hack not found in discussions of better languages.
Actually, it seems very likely that the origin of your Quixotic
"Defend Schildt" campaign was some remark your nemesis Heathfield made
about him, and you appointed yourself Schildt's defender simply to
give yourself a stick to beat him with, while claiming you were acting
to defend Schildt's (and even his family's) reputation.
Overall, that is correct. Yes, Heathfield pisses me off. But this is
because he's disruptive and a trouble maker who consistently
interrupts technical discussions by labeling, or enabling the
labeling, of one of the discussants as incompetent. He's one of those
programmers who's justly terrified that his own inadequacy will be
exposed and seeks to label others for this reason. If I only defended
myself, then I'd be biased. But on investigation I discovered that
Heathfield was also attacking a well-received (in the sense of sales)
computer book, and as a published author, I knew that a language
standard is a different *genre* from a computer book, since the
mission of the latter is to teach. To teach means to use examples that
the student must use as a basis for generalization, as in the case of
the high school geometry teacher who uses one triangle to show
something true for all triangles.
And do you have a macro to type "campaigns of personal destruction"?
It would save you a lot of time.
I prefer to think about what I write. If I have to repeat myself, so
be it. I am saying that this newsgroup could be useful if people came
here less ready to INITIATE such campaigns, and more ready to DEFEND
themselves like men.