3 ms·

Where do you see me defending that book? I haven't ever read it. I am making fun of looking back 3 decades and judging it with our current knowledge. What you c

by bitL 8y ago

Where do you see me defending that book? I haven't ever read it. I am making fun of looking back 3 decades and judging it with our current knowledge. What you can do in 10s for $0.001 now took often half a year and millions of $ to accomplish back then, if ever. It's just ridiculous to get offended by some book that didn't get it perfectly right and was likely used by smart readers as an exercise of recognizing incorrect approaches. Do you really think there was some central authority giving approvals to computing books? Do you often make fun of ridiculous movies from 30s?

mannykannot 8y ago
> Where do you see me defending that book? We could begin from your post starting this thread, where your implication that its errors are just optimizations suggests that you did not understand what's actually, indisputably wrong with the code from the book. Your comment here about current knowledge strongly suggests that you still do not. There are several posts here that explain exactly why it was simply wrong the instant it was written.
- bitL 8y ago
  Frankly, it's really difficult to talk to people that always run syntactic analyzers on everything written and aren't open to absorb the full context. Do I need to go step by step to talk what was wrong with the code? You are mistaking generosity (i.e. it has faults, but it was in a different age) with stupidity (I have no clue what I am talking about; despite writing my own compilers, writing self-modifying code in assembly language, using super duper optimizations in C++ that crashed compilers because nobody expected them etc.). Thank you very much and good luck with your literal approach! Actually, reading that code was fun for me. I wish I could go so low level these days in the mainstream...
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    I think there is at least one thing we can agree on, which is that the author of this book sincerely wanted to help people.

by bitL 8y ago

mannykannot 8y ago

> Where do you see me defending that book? We could begin from your post starting this thread, where your implication that its errors are just optimizations suggests that you did not understand what's actually, indisputably wrong with the code from the book. Your comment here about current knowledge strongly suggests that you still do not. There are several posts here that explain exactly why it was simply wrong the instant it was written.

bitL 8y ago
Frankly, it's really difficult to talk to people that always run syntactic analyzers on everything written and aren't open to absorb the full context. Do I need to go step by step to talk what was wrong with the code? You are mistaking generosity (i.e. it has faults, but it was in a different age) with stupidity (I have no clue what I am talking about; despite writing my own compilers, writing self-modifying code in assembly language, using super duper optimizations in C++ that crashed compilers because nobody expected them etc.). Thank you very much and good luck with your literal approach! Actually, reading that code was fun for me. I wish I could go so low level these days in the mainstream...
- mannykannot 8y ago
  I think there is at least one thing we can agree on, which is that the author of this book sincerely wanted to help people.