Toilet training and technical talks

mrkewlfunk — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:23:54 +0000

The recent Rails and Sydney LUG controversies have made one thing clear: some people have no sense of professionalism, politeness or concern for others. Arguments about driving women away from the computing community are a diversion; references to pornography and scat humour are simply off-topic and inappropriate in a technical presentation. Criticism of these talks has been met with adolescent rebuttals about the stifling of individuality. Nobody’s individuality is being unfairly supressed; like toilet training, it is simply necessary for the needs of others to come before your own if you want to function in society.

People who do not understand this are, rightly, looked upon with contempt by the overwhelming majority of people who do. I am offended by neither the word ‘fuck’, nor by graphic pornography. Regardless, I would be dismayed to see either referenced in a technical presentation, simply because it is not the appropriate format. Few are suggesting that computing talks should be suit-and-tie events; a liberal dress code is one thing. Displaying an unwillingness to move on from things that for others lost their novelty around the conclusion of puberty is a disgrace to the whole community.

If you don’t know assembly, then you don’t know how to program

mrkewlfunk — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 05:42:07 +0000

Be it in comments, blog posts or general discussion, the Internet is awash with suggestions that one cannot be a good programmer without knowing assembly. Or C. Or C++. Or Perl. There seems to be an obsessive defensiveness amongst programmers about their particular area of specialisation that makes them feel the need to promote it as the alpha and omega of technical achievement. There is a corresponding defensiveness about high-level programming, leading to bizarre proclamations of low-level programming being irrelevant or simply leg-work.

The notion that any language, platform or development method attracts the best programmers is unscientific, childish and absurd. When it comes to sweeping statements, I think people should simply stick to studied fact that is backed up by statistics. Regardless, there seems to be an alarming number of programmers who simply think they’re better than other people because they work in a particular language. Having interacted with some of these people, it is clear that they are often not nearly as smart as they think they are.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that many such posters are simply trolls intending to spark of an argument, but others appear to be quite genuine. There was a recent thread on comp.lang.functiona; started by a notorious language basher, regarding some Haskell performance issues. Complaining that Haskell is not as fast as some other language, whatever the practical repercussions, is missing the point. Haskell is intended to present a restrictive and declarative environment in order to make some tasks easier. Naturally, it is harder to write code that the compiler can generate efficient code for.

Such discussions are utterly fruitless; if you do not have a specific suggestion that will bring a language implementation or design closer to its goals, you are not helping anybody. Nonetheless, these discussions will likely continue. Eric Raymond has undertaken to “harpoon the Great White Whale of modern programming languages”, which he believes is C++. Whatever criticisms emerge from this and future inflammatory postings, programmers will continue to utilise all manner of tools to produce interesting and/or well-constructed work. The only sensible course of action going forward seems to be to ignore the language trolls completely.

MR KEWL FUNK

Toilet training and technical talks

If you don’t know assembly, then you don’t know how to program