developer.* Blogs - Return of the repressed as fantasy - Comments

Decorum?

Edward G Nilges — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 20:44:04 -0800

I think here "decorum" is confused with predictability. The original post made the claim that IF Sep 11 was a false story, this undermines the moral basis Americans have for going to work in the first place insofar as their work contributes to a false story.

I also wished to start a courteous discussion as to whether the consistent lack of fit between requirements and code has in part a political analysis.

In addition, I see many data processing people self-blaming for lack of progress in their careers when in fact they are held back because their work gives them a committment to truth.

Thanks, Joe

Daniel Read — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 08:10:16 -0800

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your comments. This compartmentalization thing is indeed tricky, and I suspect that what I mean by compartmentalization and what you mean by decorum are closely related and overlapping. My suggestion is not that *life* should be compartmentalized, per se, but that in social situations it's a useful tool for finding common ground and creating a feeling in other people that their views are respected, and for enabling collaboration and cooperation, as in an on-the-job situation.

Best,
Dan

P.S. If you're not logged in, any page on the blogging side of the site should have a login form in the right hand column, down near the bottom. If you're logged in already, you won't see the form, and you'll see a "log out" link in the menu. If you stay away for awhile the cookie will expire and the site will log you out. If you come back frequently, though, the cookie will seldom expire. :-)

Compartmentalization vs. Decorum

jos.trem — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 07:38:39 -0800

Dan: Sorry to have made my comment as an anonymous "guest" ... is there ready link to the developer.* logon page? I always seem to need to poke around a little before I find it.

My comment on Mr. Nilges post was made because I saw no attempt in his post to connect the conspiracy speculations with software development. His response to my short question did connect them somewhat.

I absolutely do not agree that our lives should be compartmentalized. We should, however, always act with decorum. Without unity of life -- a strong correlation between our actions and beliefs -- we become sort of schizophrenic.

On another note, Dan: the new site design looks great! Keep up the good work.

Regards,
Joe (jos.trem)

Toe Wiggling Encouraged

Daniel Read — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 14:44:54 -0800

Thank you for your comments, Edward. Please do wiggle those toes. I hate the thought of restraining anyone, and I personally find interesting your topic of the role of truth, fiction, and denial in our society at large and its effect on the work environment of software professionals (if that's a fair description). I appreciate your understanding, Edward.

And just for the record, my point is not to dispute the merits of the questions being raised about 9/11. I don't have an opinion on this fairly new controversy, but I certainly don't subscribe to the idea that it should be a taboo subject. The issue for me is not the subject matter of this particular post. At this risk of being glib about a serious topic or belittling Edward's points, the post could have been about sewing a quilt or favorite cheese sauce recipes, which could have prompted the same question from the anonymous guest, and my same comment about compartmentalization.

Best,
Dan

Fair enough

Edward G Nilges — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 18:00:36 -0800

Dan, you're the boss in the sense that you do a lot of work to maintain this great site. I will introduce politics in future only if I see an important relationship to the process of software development. Note that this committment leaves me a lot of room in which to wiggle my toes.

I do this because I see much office politics as REAL politics, real oppression, which dares not speak its name.

At the same time, we can make sense.

In my first computer class, everything outside the classroom was Kent State and "the war". My teacher was unable to keep the politics out completely but at the same time you need to as a favor to people with differing views.

The Usefulness of Compartmentalization

Daniel Read — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 06:52:07 -0800

A guest wrote:

Why was this posted to a developer.* software development blog?

This is a fair question, and I'm working on a new article for the site called "About Blogging at developer.*" that hopefully will clarify this sort of thing. In the interim, though, I wanted to comment on this issue since it's been raised directly.

In brief, as editor of the site, I try to exert as little influence as possible over the blogging area of the site. I don't want to people to feel censored, or that I'm meddling in their posts. Moreover, the people who blog here do so of their own accord. In most cases, I have not recruited them, they are not in my employ, and they represent themselves alone.

That said, the main subject area of this site is software development, and the primary purpose of the blogging and discussion area of the site in particular is to bring software professionals, students, and academics from around the world together around this common subject. I do ask that if a person is interested in starting a blog on the developer.* site that it's purpose primarily be devoted to the topic of software development--the key word there being primarily.

In a recent comment on another thread, Donna Davis brings up the idea of "compartmentalization." She writes:

Some how, at this site, I become uncomfortable when we stray too far afield from our common interest: software development. I like to think that however vastly different our backgrounds, cultures, and even IQs, we share that.

I thank Donna for introducing this idea, because I think it is very useful in the current context. One of the main reasons in my own writing on this site that I stick to development-, industry-, and profession-related topics is because I imagine that these are things that I have in common with the people out there in the world that I am trying to communicate with. If I bring up politics, I'll be alienating a huge swath of people, similarly if I bring up religion. I don't wish to alienate, but rather to bring together. It's the same reason I don't paste political cartoons on the break room refrigerator at work: I am introducing a wedge that has nothing to do with work that will by its very nature divide me from some people that I work with, which subverts our common purpose.

Similarly, it is useful, in my opinion, for us here to pretend that we don't have differences in these other areas so that we can come together in the common area that brings us to this site: software development. But that's just me.

Edward takes a different view, perhaps, and I respect that. Part of me would rather that Edward posted something like this 9/11 post in a separate blog that he maintains for the purpose of discussing non-software topics (I plan to start a blog like this for myself one day, and it will be hosted on a different site). But that's my preference, and one I am hesitant to impose on Edward, because I suspect that Edward finds this kind of compartmentalization less useful. Edward takes a holistic view of the world from a philosophical standpoint, and as he has explained in his comments above in defense of his 9/11 post, he *does* see a connection between this issue of what happened on 9/11 and the software requirements you or I might be coding from today.

On a related note, you may have noticed that this 9/11 post has not been promoted to the front page (which also means that it does not show up in the main developer.* blogs RSS feed). This is a decision on my part as editor of the site, and reflects my desire to project to the world at large that the primary subject matter here is software development.

Sometimes, though, it can be tricky to balance that with my desire for people to have their own space, that is, their own blog, to post freely within. And it can be tricky to project a consistent public face to the world under the label "developer.*" while at the same time honoring and encouraging people to post freely.

In the future, I hope that the visual design of this site will better reflect when you are viewing a post in a particular person's blog. The front page, though, and the corresponding RSS feed, will continue to reflect my own editorial bias as I sift through the posts each day. As the volume of blog posting increases on this site, this may become more significant.

Furthermore, if the volume of new daily blog posts reaches a high enough level, and if a corresponding "community" of regular readers and commentors comes together, then I plan to turn on the features of this blogging platform that I am using to allow readers to vote on the posts and the most popular posts will reach the front page automatically. For now, though, it's just me doing the sifting.

Thanks for reading. Comments welcome.

Best,
Dan

Glad you asked "why" redux

Edward G Nilges — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 23:06:44 -0800

The truth of 9-11 affects countless documents manual and automated. Conversely, to believe a lie (if the official story was one, something I do not know) affects in my view our mathematical abilities.

Math, and what Dijkstra called the "cruelly difficult" mathematics of programming, is about truth. But if we learn to freight our truth with fear then the fear infects the math, and it becomes math-anxious people pleasing behavior.

Glad you asked, "why?"

Edward G Nilges — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 23:03:45 -0800

Because software correctness (and efficiency interpreted sensibly) is based on knowledge of the way things are, and knowledge-of-the-way-things-are is under assault by Power in my considered opinion, to the extent that many knowledge workers lack the knowledge to accurately brief their superiors without fear at the CIA, to file factually accurate legal briefs, or to encode business rules in a noncontradictory fashion.

Evidence for this exists in software development as in the case where one stakeholder asserts she is the only end User who matters and who dismisses pushback for this reason and imposes constant change, and self-contradictory requirements, on the development team.

If you do not know the requirements, then by definition the code is no good. If you have been directed on pain of termination to deny an ATM transaction in your code where the withdrawal amount is 100, because the end User believes that 100 is not divisible by 20, and because as a wealthy person she has a subconscious contempt for small customers that emerges as a mathematical error, upon which she insists for the sake of corporate *amour propre* you face an unavoidable political issue in the small.

I am sorry if these types of my posts do not meet your needs. If you like, I also have posted hard code on MS-DOS commands (cf. http://www.developerdotstar.com/community/node/280) and using C safely (http://www.developerdotstar.com/community/node/291) recently.

My Apress book, Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler, includes 26000 lines of compiler code that works.

Take a look at these, and many other posts at Developer Dot Star on substring searching in an Oracle CLOB and printing in Java, for useful and purely technical material if you like. For my part I will endeavor to select the topic area of each post carefully so as not to mislead.

Why?

Guest — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 08:31:53 -0800

Why was this posted to a developer.* software development blog?

Return of the repressed as fantasy

Edward G Nilges — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 22:18:14 -0800

Just when we have the ability to retail all stories truthfully there seems a complementary demand to return to re-telling them as lies.

The collapse of the World Trade Center was filmed from dozens of perspectives yet not until recently has the possibility been taken seriously that it was a controlled demolition, which probably means that Moslems didn't do it and that it was an inside job.

The firefighters that were filmed by Gilles and Jules Naudet on *der Tag* are shown after action discussing the event in the station house, and in the Naudet documentary, one of the fire fighters says that the building collapsed "pop pop pop" AS IF it were a series of explosions, SUCH AS are used in controlled demolitions.