Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10    5/3/83; site cornell.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!floyd!vax135!cornell!ddw
From: ddw@cornell.UUCP (David Wright)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Pournelle's competence
Message-ID: <5005@cornell.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 10-Aug-83 14:12:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: cornell.5005
Posted: Wed Aug 10 14:12:51 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Aug-83 02:22:06 EDT
Sender: ddw@cornell.UUCP
Organization: Cornell Computer Science
Lines: 46

From: ddw (David Wright)
To: net-flame

I'd like to fan the flames surrounding good ol' Jerry Pournelle and his
wonderful column in Byte.  I suppose the thing does serve a purpose, and
may be valuable for people who are annoyed that Consumer Reports isn't
testing software.  HOWEVER, whenever JP ventures off the "my favorite
software" topics, he has a tendency to insert both feet in his mouth
up to the knee.

The most egregious example I know of was in Byte (last October, or maybe
the one before?) where he decided to flame about the "high priest"
mentality in computer science, the evil Edsger Dijkstra, and other related
topics.  Now, it is clear from reading the article that Pournelle knows
as much about computer science as a horse knows about hormone chemistry,
but that didn't stop him, or even slow him down.  There wasn't even a
disclaimer that he was outside of his field of expertise.  I confess that
although I simply ignored this article at first, the more I thought about it,
the madder I got and finally dispatched a lengthy and highly intemperate
message to Pournelle over the Arpanet.  To my surprise, I got a reply; he
informed me that he didn't like my tone and that given my hostility, he
didn't have time to read my message.  A couple of other messages and replies
went back and forth.  I don't have them any more, unfortunately, but I do
remember his saying something like "my column is supposed to be my opinions
of what's going on" or words to that effect.  \Nothing/ about "well, I may
not know what the hell I'm talking about."  He refuses to admit his opinion 
could be limited by a lack of knowledge.  Arrgh.

This wouldn't bother me much except that Pournelle is reaching a very wide
audience, most of which is going to assume that he knows whereof he speaks.
Thus, he's out there doing his best to convince the peepul that the computer
scientists are a bunch of nogoodnicks who are desperately trying to keep
J. Average Citizen from reaping the benefits of computers.  In his article,
he attempted to illustrate why BASIC (one of his favorites) is better than
Pascal (designed by the evil computer scientists) by including a program
in each language for doing matrix multiplication (no MAT MUL in BASIC; he
did it out)).  The BASIC program was unindented, no white space, a solid
block of code.  The Pascal program had lots of white space, nice indenting,
quite readable.  For some unfathomable reason, he announced that the BASIC
program was superior.  I gave up.

                                 David Wright

                                 {vax135|decvax|ihnss}!cornell!ddw
                                 ddw.cornell@udel-relay
                                 ddw@cornell