Statement on Herb Schildt's wikipedia entry
[In 2000, Herbert Schildt published a book on C and C++ (C++: The Complete Reference). He was harassed, it appears, over errors that were trivial but showed that he was teaching C in practice, not as it had been recently, in 2000, standardised.]
[The harassment has used usenet, Amazon, and Wikipedia. Although computer book authors are not usually given biographies in Wikipedia, it appears to me that one was created primarily to attack Herb.]
[However, it could not avoid identifying Herb's considerable contributions to the field. Instead, it included some pretty nasty stuff, including the false claim that "bullschildt" is in common use to mean "being in error about C". I'd been subject to this misuse of wiktionary and wikipedia myself when a couple of clowns on usenet tried to make the claim that Nilgewater was in common use in 2005, and I'd successfully gotten this removed.]
[It has violated, until today, wikipedia's own policies on neutral point of view (one of the criticisms in the article was that Herb shows the reader how to create a Microsoft API, which shows a clear anti-Microsoft bias) and including libel in biographies of living persons.]
[I have fixed the article and appended the following essay to the Discussion page.]
[The persecution WAS a prototype for the high-tech lynching last year of Kathy Sierra for being a woman, knowing her trade, and having a good writing style, and this shit, so common on the internet, a place where HATRED is always on-topic, has got to stop.]
[Not by making it some sort of feminist cause on a network that remains mostly male. No, by acting in solidarity with your brothers and sisters and speaking up against the malign misuse of forums to trash another person.]
WIKIPEDIA DISCUSSION
I have removed references to criticism and errors. This is because all books have errata, but it appears to me that in Schildt's case, a Web campaign was launched in 2000 by a competing author who put out a book on C at the same time.
This campaign has exagerrated Schildt's "mistakes" which are in fact his attempt to prepare the C student for dealing with actual C compilers, not all of which are conformant. For example, his "error" in claiming that "negative numbers are stored twos complement" would force a teacher of C to be silent on this common representation, leaving his students in the dark and as such, the persecution of Schildt based on this "error" bears a nasty resemblance to Nazi harassment of teachers and teacher persecution during the cultural revolution in China.
C, by design, is non-deterministic with respect to possible platforms unlike C# and Java, which are, by design, determnistic with respect to possible platforms. This means that in order to prepare students to work with C, a language in which most students will not do new development because C is recognized as perniciously out of date by many sensible managers, Herb has to teach praxis in addition to theory; but the campaign attacked him for his responsible hermeneutics (interpretation) with an alternate interpretation.
The alternate hermeneutics are based on the false belief that the computing world did not yawn and move on when C was standardised, and they are the alternative interpretations (that do not know that they are interpretations, but which are instead advanced with the crazed literalism of the Christian fundamentalist) of computing bums and coding thugs.
C isn't coextensive with standardization efforts which themselves are futile, because aliasing in C trumps everything else (unlike a standardizable and truly high-level language like Java). It is instead a sort of natural language defined as the union set of the behavior of compilers weighted by their frequence of use, on specific platforms weighted by their frequency of use. The persecution of Schildt was launched in bad faith for commercial gain, and the suggestions in the article that "Herb makes mistakes" are libelous, constituting an unfounded attack on his business.
The persecution refined the use of the Internet for harassment that focused on personality and not on issues, and was a precedent for the far more serious harassment of Java author Kathy Sierra.
Be that as it may, I have, under wikipedia's policies as regards biographies of living person, removed the distortions from the article.
It appears to me that current wikipedians talk a good game about NPOV: but somehow, hatred, harassment, possible anti-Semitism in Herb's case, and the use of the Web for commercial gain must seem rather neutral, normal, white and male to the neutral, normal, regular guys who have appointed themselves the arbiters of wikipedia's norms commencing around 2006. I had to fight a battle *royale*, a *royale* with cheese indeed, with Seth Finkelstein simply to get "alleged harassment" in the Kathy Sierra article changed to "harassment"...when in fact Kathy and her attorneys have the smoking gun in the form of eTexts that were sent to her, and threatened her with rape and death.
The 2000 harassment of Schildt on Amazon, usenet and here prototyped this campaign against Sierra. The article was non-neutral point of view and libelous. It was non-neutral point of view because many, many C students need to know Windows API coding (it is NNPOV to be anti-microsoft in a wikipedia article, you clowns). It was libelous because it falsely claimed that on the topic of C, Herb had not done due diligence, which he had given that C!=standard C.
Edward G. Nilges, author, Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler
On foolishly defending another person's reputation
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
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.