Re: Exception Handling

["Paul A. Houle" <houle@msc.cornell.edu>]

Don't sweat it.  People on newsgroups treat each other like
garbage.  This is because we can.  If people talked trash to each
other the way that we do on USENET,  we'd see visual nonverbal
signals of agression that would make us feel to distressed to
continue.

	When the people on the other end of the connection are
nothing more than a bit of badly written,  and these days,  badly
formatted,  text sometimes you get to feel that people should get
the death penalty for stupid posts,  unsolicited commerical spam
and such.

	Another issue is that computer people are not good about
attribution.  To take an example,  it seems clear that the advances
in compiler technology from,  say,  the mid 60's to the mid 80's
sprang from the lingustic discoveries of Noam Chomsky.  Most of the
people who use the technology don't care.  In fact,  even CS
academics don't talk about it much,  probably because they
associate Noam Chomsky with the student protests of the 1960's
and opposition to the Vietnam war.  

	I get the impression that people learn programming from
copying other people's code.  If book publishers were honest about
it,  they'd write a book titled "Learn to Cut and Paste Java in
21 Hours!"  People are more concerned with getting a program
working fast than they are on attributing the source.