developer.* Blogs - Statement on Herb Schildt's wikipedia entry - Comments

On foolishly defending another person's reputation

Edward G Nilges — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:00:03 -0800

Part of the reason for the vicious attacks I was subjected to on the Lamma Island placeblog www.lamma.com.HK was the fact that I defended a poster with gender ambiguity. This apparently caused the stalkerette, who'd introduced herself to me in September, to betray me thereafter, turning against me on the placeblog.

She was careful to assure me that the gender-ambiguous poster was in some way a troll, where we get to deny the reality of trolling by conflating a definition based on an image of a marginal character without a life, and the original definition, which had to do with posting insincerely to get a response.

However, as I pointed out to the stalkerette at the time, it's rather hard to express gender-ambiguity insincerely, if only because the expression is the ambiguity. If some regular guy gets drunk and makes a half-ironic homosexual pass at another regular guy, he ain't kidding.

His enemies were using irony absolutely and not ironically. It was very important for them to maintain the pose of the ironic funny guy in the pub who knows anything worth knowing, and at any time (such as the time I posted Yeat's poem Sailing to Byzantium, its line "this is no country for old men" being my comment on Lamma Island) that pose is challenged, the challenge like Carthage must be ironically dismissed as somehow, in some way, not with it.

The group pursued him as Schildt was pursued, focusing not on the outside world but on his inadequacy with a childish obsessiveness that I also saw in the hounding of Schildt.

The rather wise for her years gallery owner here assured me "people aren't interested in art". No, they aren't, and I do observe amongst the better heeled in Hong Kong and amongst wealthy expats, a complete failure to take interest in much of anything except personalities and individual wealth...when any one of them finds the personalities with which they have been affiliated unkewl, they abandon them, or, in a celebrated case a couple of years ago (Nancy Kissell) they feed 'em a poisoned milk-shake, and, when this doesn't work, they bludgeon their sweeties to death.

Code mostly bores and angers the people who infest comp.programming to the extent that the only thing that galvanizes people are finding mistakes, not usually hard bugs, but questions of style...just as "what main() returns", and not the desparately important issue of "what can be asserted at time t" becomes a central fashion statement amongst latter-day C and C++ programmers...to the extent that even Bjarne Stroustrup falls prey to this *weltanschaung* and *zeitgeist*, and tells the reader in his C++ faqs that "you must know this not to seem stupid"...not because it is TRUE.

This is why I got Schildt's article cleaned up. I've seen whole companies destroyed by "people persons" who use a sort of decayed New Age rhetoric to do their jobs by classifying their co-workers into acceptable types and weirdos.

Schildt article cleaned up in response to my statement

Edward G Nilges — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:43:06 -0800

The Schildt article has been cleaned up by a non-anonymous editor in response to my statement and is now a fair statement of this person's record.

If you see a Wikipedia article created in order to attack, or vandalized with personal attacks, don't allow this "free speech". Exercise your freedom of speech, because (as I tried to make clear in my usenet post "Brian Kernighan, Maybe I'm Not Worthy, Maybe I'm Scum" you can criticise the output or affects of a person without focusing on the person with statements such as "don't trust Schildt", statements that globally trash a person.

Change the article to remove language of the form "x is y" where x is a person's name, and y is a general predicate unsupportable by the evidence, such as "incompetent".

In Schildt's case, he'd done well in 1989 by writing a recursive descent parser and interpreter for a subset of C in somewhat the same way my book does this for Quick Basic, and followed up in the early Nineties with a great book on C, "Born to Code".

He came a bit of a cropper in 1999 with The Complete C++ Reference because he ignored the power of the "standardisation" movement which is foolishly trying to standardize a language which is intentionally non-deterministic and machine-dependent.

However, this was no reason to launch a global, and Stalinist, campaign against Schildt as a person. The problem is that many people in technology are, in their ignorance of history and Stalinism, unconsciously Stalinist.

Like the followers of Stalin they prefer talking about personalities to thinking hard about engineering. For example, it is impossible for them to reflect that the standard is silent on the representation of negative numbers while out there in the real world, most of the time, negative numbers are represented twos-complement, and that a mentor like Schildt is bound to pass on this fact.

The attacks on Schildt have been checked on wikipedia. Don't let people use "freedom of speech" to so globally dismiss, not a thesis, but a person.

Statement on Herb Schildt's wikipedia entry

Edward G Nilges — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 22:58:52 -0800