[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