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From: bagpiper@pnet02.gryphon.com (Michael Hunter)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Help... (flame *) :-(
Message-ID: <20977@gryphon.COM>
Date: 16 Oct 89 03:20:20 GMT
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bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) writes:
>In article <143@.rsp.is> orn@rsp.is (Orn E. Hansen) writes:
>: In article <18227@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>, jas@postgres.uucp (James Shankland) writes:
>: > Why don't you try slaughtering a goat over your terminal, and letting the
>: > Randomly trying things, in the absence of an understanding of what's
>: > really going on, is no way to solve a computer problem.
>: >
>: Randomly trying things gives you a multiple perspective to observe a single
>: point.  Sometimes called SCIENCE, and used to gain new ways and methods to
>: help humanity on it's path through life.
>
>Ignorant fool.
>
>Randomly trying things is the farthest thing from science.
>
>Scientists try new things, but they do so because they have reasons.

I just don't understand this harshness.  Ya' know, I think life is pretty
cool most of the time...but stress is definitely not my favorite part of life.
Why do we have to use phrases like "Ignorant fool" and harsh rebuttals when
replying to someones most likely harmless opinion.  
And you know, the original person might be close to correct.  Think about the
situation when you are dealing with a deadline and a small amount of
information (say creeping requirements comming down from design folks and a
true DEADline).  You can tell me that you carefully track down those bugs in
that new package that some other company wrote that you only have object and
poor doc to, but for some reason I think that you are going to use you well
honed intuition and take some guesstimations at the troubles.  Don't tell me
that this is well planned.
The other thought that comes to mind is that if everything was well planned
and thought out automatic theorem provers would be an order of magnitude
easier to engineer. :)
>:
>: How would you othervise come to know, what isn't known?  to understand what
>: is misunderstood?
>
>By thinking and directed activity, which you obviously don't believe
>in. And are clearly not accustomed to.

IMHO true and false.  The thinking and directed activity that might be applied
in most lab work is VERY important.  On the other hand, sometime intuition is
very important.  I will admit to being very jealous of those people in my math
classes in school that always seemed to not only be able to solve all the
problems but ALSO choose the most efficient way of getting to the solution. 
One of the books that I read on problem solving at the time was "How to solve
it" by G. Ploya.  From this and common sense (oh no, not that!) I realized
that there was not way of teaching or forcing myself to pick those nice ways
of solving problems.  I just had to keep striving on improving my abilities to
solve problems, and tune my problem solving filter as good as I could.  With
you comments on science being well thought out and well planned I'm not sure
what I could do?  Do I just give up because I did not learn an algorithm for
problem solving?
>
>Followups have been directed to alt.flame.

hmmmm...my news reader is broken, but it is getting pretty esoteric.
>
>---
>Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh | sunvice } !twwells!bill
>bill@twwells.com

I've seen you give some pretty good answers to some things...but this was a
bit arrogant.


Mike Hunter - Box's and CPU's from HELL: iapx80[012]86, PR1ME 50 Series, 1750a
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