4 ms·

I'm still klotz, though I use unix now.

DonHopkins 10y ago
What's this I hear from the GamerGate folks about you being a woman bureaucrat, a broad who is the worst type of mean, nasty and petty, hiding your vindictiveness behind a facade of professional-sounding language (they do say Logo is just Lisp without parens), and also a snot nosed hectoring undergrad? You've been an inspiration to us all, and the computer industry need more nasty women like you! I heard an alternative fact that Kent Pitman develop a New Implementation of Lisp in which NIL equals T, which inspired many other popular languages like PHP and JavaScript to adopt alternative definitions of equality, based on the insight that all objects are equal, but some objects are more equal than others. And speaking of bright 12-year-olds, I heard that David Vinayak Wallace was the youngest kid to ever have his own office at the MIT-AI Lab, and as a small brown child he once schooled Jerry Pournelle for free [1]: Date: Sunday, 2 January 1983, 22:48-EST From: David Vinayak Wallace Subject: The changing face of Micro-computing... Date: 31 December 1982 04:00-EST From: Jerry E. Pournelle (I re-ordered some of your statements) The notion that "It's too late for the parents" is goofy. Bill and Sibyl Grieb have packed classes at everywoman's Village on using computers; they teach CP/M and customization and all that. Patience: it took far longer for the "average citizen" to learn enough mechanics to be able to be comfortable using cars than it is taking for people to get used to computers. I think this example shows why it IS too late. You can always find a few exceptions to the rule; these exceptions are a tiny (>.5%) part of the actual computer user. I doesn't take mechanical knowledge to drive a car, it takes mechanical knowledge to modify or repair an automobile. most people (me included) would rather buy a vanilla car and just have it work all the time. I change the oil (more than most people do), but have a mechanic do the real work. The problem with adult learners are the ones I had: no one seems to know how to explain things in English. You have to learn a lot more than you really need to in order to be able to do much of anything. Some of us, though, are trying to change that, and a few of us are not only doing something about it, but getting paid to. The High Priest mentality in which one accepts whatever a highly paid computer technician tells you, is dying away in industry already, and the micro world ain't going to let it get a foot hold... I'm biased, but I don't think this will really work. You can't discuss complex concepts without the proper language. I agree that there is a bit of High Priest mentality and that there is no good effort to teach the JARGON, but every "normal language" explanation of anything having to do with computers comes out muddled, long-winded, and ultimately, unclear.. Some of us even do it for free. david [1] https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~cwm/NetStuff/Human-Nets/Volume6.html https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~cwm/NetStuff/Human-Nets/Volume6....

What's this I hear from the GamerGate folks about you being a woman bureaucrat, a broad who is the worst type of mean, nasty and petty, hiding your vindictiveness behind a facade of professional-sounding language (they do say Logo is just Lisp without parens), and also a snot nosed hectoring undergrad? You've been an inspiration to us all, and the computer industry need more nasty women like you! I heard an alternative fact that Kent Pitman develop a New Implementation of Lisp in which NIL equals T, which inspired many other popular languages like PHP and JavaScript to adopt alternative definitions of equality, based on the insight that all objects are equal, but some objects are more equal than others. And speaking of bright 12-year-olds, I heard that David Vinayak Wallace was the youngest kid to ever have his own office at the MIT-AI Lab, and as a small brown child he once schooled Jerry Pournelle for free [1]: Date: Sunday, 2 January 1983, 22:48-EST From: David Vinayak Wallace Subject: The changing face of Micro-computing... Date: 31 December 1982 04:00-EST From: Jerry E. Pournelle (I re-ordered some of your statements) The notion that "It's too late for the parents" is goofy. Bill and Sibyl Grieb have packed classes at everywoman's Village on using computers; they teach CP/M and customization and all that. Patience: it took far longer for the "average citizen" to learn enough mechanics to be able to be comfortable using cars than it is taking for people to get used to computers. I think this example shows why it IS too late. You can always find a few exceptions to the rule; these exceptions are a tiny (>.5%) part of the actual computer user. I doesn't take mechanical knowledge to drive a car, it takes mechanical knowledge to modify or repair an automobile. most people (me included) would rather buy a vanilla car and just have it work all the time. I change the oil (more than most people do), but have a mechanic do the real work. The problem with adult learners are the ones I had: no one seems to know how to explain things in English. You have to learn a lot more than you really need to in order to be able to do much of anything. Some of us, though, are trying to change that, and a few of us are not only doing something about it, but getting paid to. The High Priest mentality in which one accepts whatever a highly paid computer technician tells you, is dying away in industry already, and the micro world ain't going to let it get a foot hold... I'm biased, but I don't think this will really work. You can't discuss complex concepts without the proper language. I agree that there is a bit of High Priest mentality and that there is no good effort to teach the JARGON, but every "normal language" explanation of anything having to do with computers comes out muddled, long-winded, and ultimately, unclear.. Some of us even do it for free. david [1] https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~cwm/NetStuff/Human-Nets/Volume6.html https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~cwm/NetStuff/Human-Nets/Volume6....