From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: * X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.1 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_05,REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 109fba,99e2dadd49ce1936 X-Google-Attributes: gid109fba,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,99e2dadd49ce1936 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: 1108a1,99e2dadd49ce1936 X-Google-Attributes: gid1108a1,public X-Google-Thread: 107d55,99e2dadd49ce1936 X-Google-Attributes: gid107d55,public From: Rick Decker Subject: Re: Exception Handling Date: 1996/09/18 Message-ID: <32401CA0.4EDF@hamilton.edu> X-Deja-AN: 181393807 references: <323750EA.167E@maths.usyd.edu.au> <519bl1$bta@lace.colorado.edu> <1996Sep12.180552.1@eisner> <3238B024.794B@maths.usyd.edu.au> <323A92B7.51234AE0@msc.cornell.edu> content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii organization: HAmilton College mime-version: 1.0 reply-to: rdecker@hamilton.edu newsgroups: comp.object,comp.lang.java.tech,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.ada x-mailer: Mozilla 2.02 (Macintosh; I; PPC) Date: 1996-09-18T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Paul A. Houle wrote: > > 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 [like a punch in the mouth, f'r example] >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. Quite right. One makes allowances for newbie behavior in the hope that with time will come an understanding of, say, newsgroup netiquette. What I find far more distressing is having to listen to people who, after months and perhaps years, never manage to infer the rules governing polite behavior. Oh well, that's what killfiles are for, but it's still regrettable. > > 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. Oh, golly. Now I have to disagree. First, for someone to choose deliberately to ignore Chomsky for his activities against the war would require (1) that these activities were known, which would likely mean the person would have to be at least as venerable as I am and (2) that the person would even find such behavior reprehensible in the first place. No, I'd suggest that the liklier reasons would be that, first, Chomsky's stuff is somewhat intimidating for a non-specialist, and, second, that there are quite a few derivative sources in CS literature that put transformational grammars and language hierarchies in a much more familiar context. I just did a quick scan of my bookshelves and of the sixteen books I have on theory and formal languages all sixteen mention Chomsky prominently. I got bored before I finished my compiler texts, but at least the Dragon Book and Son of Dragon both contain citations of Chomsky. Doesn't sound to me that he's *that* seriously ignored. > > I get the impression that people learn programming from > copying other people's code. I don't have a problem with that. My guess is that if you were to ask a collection of programmers how they learned that particular skill, a large fraction would admit to having spent a lot of time looking at the code other people produced. After all, isn't that the way we all learned our first (and subsequent) natural language? So why should learning a programming language be that much different? >If book publishers were honest about > it, they'd write a book titled "Learn to Cut and Paste Java in > 21 Hours!" If the title were a truthful statement of the contents, I'd buy it in a second. Even better, if I thought it could be done, I'd write it myself and retire early. Unfortunately, it's a hopeless task. Even if you used a modern app builder, where the cutting and pasting is done by the program, no collection of canned code could possibly cover all the apps we would want to write. The inevitable conclusion is that no matter how many code exemplars we have available, we still have to know enough to wrap them up in a robust, correct program, which is very good news for those of us in the ed biz. That said, I'll still reiterate my point that while on the road to learning how to program, examples can be very useful. >People are more concerned with getting a program > working fast than they are on attributing the source. Good. I get to end on a note of agreement, sort of. I agree that the general standards of citation could use some work. The rules differ slightly between real world programs and the sort of toy programs students write, but not by much. Getting a program working fast is a good thing. Understanding what you're doing is even better, and acknowledging publicly where the borrowed chunks came from is even better. Regards, Rick ----------------------------------------------------- Rick Decker rdecker@hamilton.edu Department of Comp. Sci. 315-859-4785 Hamilton College Clinton, NY 13323 = != == (!) -----------------------------------------------------