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This is a great article and more people should read it. I was wondering why the sentences sound so familiar and it turns out it's heavily plagiarised (as in, a
by svat 8y ago
This is a great article and more people should read it. I was wondering why the sentences sound so familiar and it turns out it's heavily plagiarised (as in, a substantial number of sentences and paragraphs are
lifted verbatim from) Gerald Weinberg's book The Psychology of Computer Programming (listed at the end as one of the "references").
Read this book; much of it is still very applicable decades later (and the exercise of translating it into modern terms makes you think and is valuable too).
- mannykannot 8y agoI was about to say the same; the phrase "The programmer comes down the hall with his output listing and it is very thin..." certainly shows its age. The message, however, is just as relevant now as it was then.
- huntie 8y agoI just stumbled across Weinberg's book at the library yesterday and thought that it looked good. I'm glad to hear that it is.
- pc86 8y agoI think by definition if it's heavily plagiarized another source it's not a great article.
- d0lph 8y agoNot necessarily, humans are pretty derivative in general.
- pc86 8y agoYou can be derivative without plagiarizing someone else's work.
- svat 8y agoDepends on your definitions. If someone makes a copy of the Mona Lisa and claims it as their own, does it stop being a great painting? (Or if you don't think the Mona Lisa is a great painting, replace with whatever you think is.) In fact given what I can tell of the author(s) in this case, we should be grateful it's so heavily plagiarized; the less they plagiarized (and the more they inserted their own content), it seems the worse it would be. :-) ---------------------------------- BTW I took a look at the article again, and it contains solely of two paragraphs picked up verbatim from Wikipedia, followed by the remaining paragraphs each verbatim from book. The only changes I could detect were: 1. where the book mentions "Starting with the work of the social psychologist Festinger", the article has "Starting with the work of the social psychologist Leon Festinger" with a link to the Wikipedia article for him 2. the article introduces random bolding of various words 3. where the book says > There are thousands of variations to these plaints, but the one thing we never seem to hear is a simple... the article says (turning the correct "hear" into "here") > There are thousands of variations to these objections, if you are interested in finding more, check out devexcuses or programmingexcuses. But the one thing we never seem to here is a simple... Apart from that, there doesn't seem to be a single original sentence in the article.