3 ms·

I can well understand telling computers and their users to go fuck themselves. A bit of funemployment over the covid period helped that attitude. What didn't

I can well understand telling computers and their users to go fuck themselves. A bit of funemployment over the covid period helped that attitude. What didn't help _why or mark pilgrim was the seemingly universal praise. Their work was too quirky to be very popular. e.g. Dive Into Python's choice of roman numeral conversion as an exercise. Also Mark must've felt like a fish out of water at IBM.

coldtea 3y ago
>Also Mark must've felt like a fish out of water at IBM. Huh? Dissapearenace aside, he is (or was) a programmer, writer and blogger, with quite regular opinions, not some quirky magical writer of whimsy. I can understand _why_'s fox-ladden guide to Ruby to be considered "quirky" but there's nothing quirky about Dive Into Python, I can't even understand how one would get that idea (I'd consider the thought itself quirky!). And how is the choice of "roman numeral conversion as an exercise" quirky in any way? As far as programming exercises go, it's quite standard and straightforward. People are likely to know a little about roman numerals (if not from anything else, from movie and game titles using roman numerals), and there's a mapping with well defined rules between roman and decimal representations. Oh, and Dive into Python was quite popular, and it was even put in print (both editions), iirc from Apress. Mark had also written a few books for O'Reilly, back when doing so was kind of a bigger deal.
- emmelaich 3y ago
  New programmers want to write something visual; website or game maybe. I bought a physical copy of Dive into Python. Gave it up after one or two chapters and just bought dabeaz's reference instead. I'm not the only one with a negative reaction towards the choice of Roman numerals!
  - coldtea 3y ago
    >New programmers want to write something visual; website or game maybe. Don't know if you're a new programmer, but command line based examples, that are neither websites nor games nor visual, are the norm in almost every programming book, including almost all Python books. This idea that Dive Into Python was somehow an exception or "quirky" because it didn't have examples of visual programs ("websites or games"), is entirely out of touch with programming books. (And of course, dabeaz's reference is a different thing altogether, and even further away from "something visual; website or game maybe").
    - emmelaich 3y ago
      I guess not so much games/websites but something you can see yourself using. Roman numeral conversion is not one of those. Neither, for example is SICP's example of Newton-Raphson. I don't want to bang on about it. They're fine books. Just could have used an better editor or some other constructive advice to make it less niche and more relatable. FWIW I also bought Learning Python which was meh, and Python Cookbook which is directly useful.

coldtea 3y ago

>Also Mark must've felt like a fish out of water at IBM. Huh? Dissapearenace aside, he is (or was) a programmer, writer and blogger, with quite regular opinions, not some quirky magical writer of whimsy. I can understand _why_'s fox-ladden guide to Ruby to be considered "quirky" but there's nothing quirky about Dive Into Python, I can't even understand how one would get that idea (I'd consider the thought itself quirky!). And how is the choice of "roman numeral conversion as an exercise" quirky in any way? As far as programming exercises go, it's quite standard and straightforward. People are likely to know a little about roman numerals (if not from anything else, from movie and game titles using roman numerals), and there's a mapping with well defined rules between roman and decimal representations. Oh, and Dive into Python was quite popular, and it was even put in print (both editions), iirc from Apress. Mark had also written a few books for O'Reilly, back when doing so was kind of a bigger deal.

emmelaich 3y ago
New programmers want to write something visual; website or game maybe. I bought a physical copy of Dive into Python. Gave it up after one or two chapters and just bought dabeaz's reference instead. I'm not the only one with a negative reaction towards the choice of Roman numerals!
- coldtea 3y ago
  >New programmers want to write something visual; website or game maybe. Don't know if you're a new programmer, but command line based examples, that are neither websites nor games nor visual, are the norm in almost every programming book, including almost all Python books. This idea that Dive Into Python was somehow an exception or "quirky" because it didn't have examples of visual programs ("websites or games"), is entirely out of touch with programming books. (And of course, dabeaz's reference is a different thing altogether, and even further away from "something visual; website or game maybe").
  - emmelaich 3y ago
    I guess not so much games/websites but something you can see yourself using. Roman numeral conversion is not one of those. Neither, for example is SICP's example of Newton-Raphson. I don't want to bang on about it. They're fine books. Just could have used an better editor or some other constructive advice to make it less niche and more relatable. FWIW I also bought Learning Python which was meh, and Python Cookbook which is directly useful.