To: Homestead mailing list digest <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [Homestead] Whining
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2004 21:08:12 -0800
It's a good thing we're buddies again because this line of defense was
getting nowhere. It was having about the same impact as holding up a
bulb of garlic or a crucifix. For one thing, I'm not fundamentally a
whiner, as anyone can tell. But even more critical, the post I
originally reacted to could itself be interpreted as whining. I've been
known to whine myself occasionally about fat lazy bastards sucking up
welfare.
It bothers me a little that you stated, as you have to others, that it
was unconditionally considered whining to react negatively to rudeness
or insensitivity. I guess everyone has his own opinion, but this is
hardly the way to win friends and influence people.
You were going to seize upon my travails with the compiler as tenuous
evidence of my blackheartedness? Please, many installations where I've
worked or taught have signs on the wall saying that you never blame the
compiler. It's in the first chapter of most programming texts. I have
no doubt that it works great, although it comes with a disclaimer saying
it's not guaranteed to be free of bugs. I'm sure they were able to hire
many, many Taiwanese to help perfect it.
What bothers me is that if a person who wasn't already an expert
programmer were to buy this compiler, in most cases they wouldn't be
able to make it do jack. That's not true of the only other compiler I
ever bought for a microcomputer, the Think Pascal compiler for
MacIntosh. It was frustrating in some ways, and only offered one
graphics window and one text window (actually I'm not really sure of
that), but when you used "readln" in a program it stopped and waited for
input from the keyboard, opening a text window to echo back the input.
With this BS, it's clear to me that no one necessarily wants you to
learn how to do that. How would that encourage people to buy software?
But, as a person who has met or exceeded every intellectual challenge
ever posed to him, I have no doubt that my lover will figure out how to
do it and then teach me! We just need to buy an (n+1)th manual.