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> My audience is programmers This gets to the heart of why I felt it necessary to comment at all, and as you have gathered, am being derisive and negative towa

by fargle 7y ago

> My audience is programmers This gets to the heart of why I felt it necessary to comment at all, and as you have gathered, am being derisive and negative toward your website with navigation panel. Programmers is not a term I like. It implies that you trust someone to write a program. And the way you use the term, you do not need to be an engineer or a computer scientist. Therefore we need to "dumb down" some super-to-complicated content X. For another example in the same genre: https://poignant.guide/ https://poignant.guide/ This kind of narcissistic behavior and writing is amateurish and insulting to those of us who actually do the fairly hard work of learning and working in a formal field. Just about every security vulnerability and every broken memory hog of a java program is due people acting and thinking like programmers, not engineers. Computer Scientists are not the cause of rampant security vulnerabilities.

brazzy 7y ago
Indeed it seems we have arrived at the heart of our disagreement. You are proud of having done "hard work of learning and working in a formal field", and are accustomend to the writing and publishing style of that field, and that has led you to strongly resent the implication that something which does not follow that style could possibly be better in any way or for any purpose than something that does. And I believe that you are wrong, that the academic writing style is not the most appropriate for every situation or every audience, and that there is value in addressing different situations and audiences. > Programmers is not a term I like. It implies that you trust someone to write a program. It really only implies that someone is writing a program. > And the way you use the term, you do not need to be an engineer or a computer scientist. That is a simple fact. And another fact is that even most people who've had formal education in engineering or computer science typically lose fluency with the formal academic style and notation once they leave academics, because it is very rarely needed in their daily work. > For another example in the same genre: https://poignant.guide/ https://poignant.guide/ > This kind of narcissistic behavior and writing is amateurish and insulting to those of us who actually do the fairly hard work of learning and working in a formal field. And here you are engaging in nothing but arrogant, elitist gatekeeping. You don't have to like that writing style (I don't either), but taking it as a personal insult is silly, and the implication that there is only one appropriate style for any writing that concerns programming is needlessly close-minded. > Just about every security vulnerability and every broken memory hog of a java program is due people acting and thinking like programmers, not engineers. Computer Scientists are not the cause of rampant security vulnerabilities. I beg to differ. Being well versed in computer security and having formal computer science or engieering education are not all that strongly correlated. I would in fact bet money that more than 50% of the security vulnerabilities on https://cve.mitre.org/ https://cve.mitre.org/ were originally introduced by someone with formal computer science education. In fact, computer scientists with no industry experience are often godawful at programming, including security and performance aspects, because they're used primarily to writing throwaway proof of concept code that doesn't need to be maintained.
- fargle 7y ago
  So please point to all the security holes created by Lamport or Knuth. I didn't say, by the way, credentialed engineer. I said "think like an engineer". I'd even accept Hacker. Those who are just "programmers" are essentially data-entry clerks. And EVEN THEY can read Goldberg before doing floating point for at least they can get a hint of the difficulties. "Java Programmers" writing blogs and websites for "Ruby Programmers" to give hints to "C# programmers" so they don't have to cut-paste from Stack Overflow is harmful. It's noise and addition random bad information that a good programmer, who should be engineering a solution, will have to cull out.
  - brazzy 7y ago
    > So please point to all the security holes created by Lamport or Knuth. If the logical fallacy in this request is not glaringly obvious to you then you have less understanding of computer science than most "data-entry clerks".

by fargle 7y ago

brazzy 7y ago

Indeed it seems we have arrived at the heart of our disagreement. You are proud of having done "hard work of learning and working in a formal field", and are accustomend to the writing and publishing style of that field, and that has led you to strongly resent the implication that something which does not follow that style could possibly be better in any way or for any purpose than something that does. And I believe that you are wrong, that the academic writing style is not the most appropriate for every situation or every audience, and that there is value in addressing different situations and audiences. > Programmers is not a term I like. It implies that you trust someone to write a program. It really only implies that someone is writing a program. > And the way you use the term, you do not need to be an engineer or a computer scientist. That is a simple fact. And another fact is that even most people who've had formal education in engineering or computer science typically lose fluency with the formal academic style and notation once they leave academics, because it is very rarely needed in their daily work. > For another example in the same genre: https://poignant.guide/ https://poignant.guide/ > This kind of narcissistic behavior and writing is amateurish and insulting to those of us who actually do the fairly hard work of learning and working in a formal field. And here you are engaging in nothing but arrogant, elitist gatekeeping. You don't have to like that writing style (I don't either), but taking it as a personal insult is silly, and the implication that there is only one appropriate style for any writing that concerns programming is needlessly close-minded. > Just about every security vulnerability and every broken memory hog of a java program is due people acting and thinking like programmers, not engineers. Computer Scientists are not the cause of rampant security vulnerabilities. I beg to differ. Being well versed in computer security and having formal computer science or engieering education are not all that strongly correlated. I would in fact bet money that more than 50% of the security vulnerabilities on https://cve.mitre.org/ https://cve.mitre.org/ were originally introduced by someone with formal computer science education. In fact, computer scientists with no industry experience are often godawful at programming, including security and performance aspects, because they're used primarily to writing throwaway proof of concept code that doesn't need to be maintained.

fargle 7y ago
So please point to all the security holes created by Lamport or Knuth. I didn't say, by the way, credentialed engineer. I said "think like an engineer". I'd even accept Hacker. Those who are just "programmers" are essentially data-entry clerks. And EVEN THEY can read Goldberg before doing floating point for at least they can get a hint of the difficulties. "Java Programmers" writing blogs and websites for "Ruby Programmers" to give hints to "C# programmers" so they don't have to cut-paste from Stack Overflow is harmful. It's noise and addition random bad information that a good programmer, who should be engineering a solution, will have to cull out.
- brazzy 7y ago
  > So please point to all the security holes created by Lamport or Knuth. If the logical fallacy in this request is not glaringly obvious to you then you have less understanding of computer science than most "data-entry clerks".