22 Nov
2011
22 Nov
'11
11:34 p.m.
On 22/11/11 10:57 PM, Vincent Slyngstad wrote:
It is this annoyance that I was originally trying to get at. It should be
possible to stick to the cultural context that is likely to be shared with
whoever has to fix the code later. I was arguing that it was helpful to
do so, and leave the broadening experiences for another time.
Right: I don't think comments should be off-topic.
--Toby
From: "Chuck Guzis"; Tuesday, November 22,
2011 9:08 AM
OK, I must have missed something. I thought I was commenting on
a remark about a story about Guru Beads by an ex-IBMer who lived
with gypsies in the mountains. Did his story have to do with complex
numbers?
I beg your pardon - we agree! I misread your replies as disparaging the
earlier link I posted (which was a lesson on complex numbers as a
preamble to some Lisp code).
Maybe it's a cultural thing. If you've
spent your life writing and
maintaining applications, you probably don't have much of a sense of
humor plowing through hundreds of thousands of lines of COBOL.. On
the other hand, if you've spent your time writing systems code
(drivers, operating systems, compilers, etc.), the view is a little
different, I think.
I'm a kernel and driver guy myself, but the culture where I worked
was not exactly laid back.
From: "Toby Thain"; Tuesday, November 22, 2011 4:55 PM
If it
really helps explain what is going on in a terse and to-the-point
way, then I'll be glad of it, too. If it is a distracting anecdote about
someone's lifestyle, not so much.
It was a lecture on *complex numbers*. If you want to criticise the
didactic style, go ahead; but instead, you wrote:
'there is a time and place for such stuff ... it's *not* in the
middle of trying to understand and debug someone else's code'
Did you not consider that the code in question might have involved
complex numbers? Why assume it was an irrelevant digression? It could
well be helpful for debugging or just understanding how the following
code works.
Especially in the pre-Internet days,
I'd be mighty annoyed about having to stop and go look something up.
Um, touch?. And half the world wouldn't bother and would go ahead with
the usual "what happens if I change *that*" haphazard fiddling.
Vince