The Commissar has given a call to arms and raised a significant hue and cry over the recent pissy remarks by an apparently poorly socialized coder. A part of the coder's missive included:
You are all pretentious twatsEvery last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky. Most of you think that you're writing original content and that you're making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" licences, just because it's the hip thing to do.
Let's see. I like cappuchino, cafe mocha, cafe au lait, but I like wine and single malt Scotch better. I use and post on PCs (desktop and laptop, Windows ME, Windows 2000, and Windows XP) and Macs (used to be a G3 "gray box" but now a 15" PowerBook is my new toy, no iMac for me). I learned FORTRAN IV back when we still used punch cards, and I learned BASIC back when the Z80 was considered a blazingly fast processor. I think my computer credentials are reasonable, and I'm old enough to bitch about how the Internet really fucked up the ARPAnet email system because I used it back when it was still the ARPAnet. I haven't learned any programming since BASIC and FORTRAN because I regarded it as the technological equivalent of ditch-digging (no offense to you coders out there who aren't obnoxious like our friend James A C Joyce) and left it to those who found it cool. I was more interested in science and ways to make the computers faster and smaller, not in the drudge work of writing software.
I'm white, but I'm more American Indian and Celtic than I am Anglo-Saxon, and I'm certainly not Protestant. I have quite a few original insights, on technology (wanna see my list of publications or patent portfolio?), and I've been offered jobs in a variety of fields, including writing and publishing. I certainly have better things to do than to complain about how the "unwashed heathen" are screwing up what I thought was my private playground. As I said before, the Internet used to be the ARPAnet, and I was one of the researchers who used email on the ARPAnet for the purpose that drove the invention, trading data and insights on research faster than by regular mail. Oh, and one other thing, those "tertiary industries" are the ones who buy all the computers and consequently have made them so cheap and built our amazing economy (even in this recession, it's still amazing).
I've seen this attitude from coders before, just as I've seen it from the Physics geeks back when I was in grad school. It's a combination of envy and poor social skills, and we should pity James A C Joyce for his attitude since he apparently thinks it's cool to write on a web site that uses numbers in it's name (talk about pretentious!!)
Success is the best revenge, anyway...
Posted by Jack at 22:06 on Thursday 5 February 2004 | Trackbacks (3)Bwa-HAH!
As a coder, Jack, I approve mightily of this post.
Need any K&R "C" on UNIX platforms, or C#.NET on WIN platforms? How about Fortran 77 on a VAX/VMS box with a Gould Image Processing device? ADA on an OSF/1 box? LISP on a Gentoo Linux distro? yacc on a Motorola 88K chipset machine? lexx or awk on a Data General AvIIon workstation?
Call the Bejus Pundit.
Posted by: Donnie at February 5, 2004 10:58 PMNow I know Donnie's secret... he's a geek, and a really serious one.
Lord, I spent YEARS killing the FORTRAN/VMS version of Janus to get that spaghetti code dragged into the late 20th Century.
Nice takedown, Jack.
Posted by: John of Argghhh! at February 6, 2004 03:57 PM