Star Bucks

What's more important is that you remember the name Eli Whitney. Although you are clearly trying to change the topic by bringing up one of the few times when technology reduced the quality of human condition. Why not mention Norman Borlaug instead? Especially, in the context of this article. Do people think that discovering photo-electric effect was a genius or do they call every genius an "Einstein"?

The fact that their names are already forgotten is not just an injustice to Ciara Judge, Émer Hickey and Sophie Healy-Thow. It is, once again, an attempt to put the political context (their nationality and gender) above the actual achievement. Just try for a second doing the same thing with a headline about a movie actor. As in "... a famous California performer was sentenced to rehab today..." Does it seem like you are telling the full story there? Of course, not.

Science is first and foremost a human endeavor. And any attempt to dehumanize it denigrates it. I have always maintained that every scientist and every mathematician must have it stipulated in writtng that their name appear first in any headline of any article about them if they agree to an interview on which the article is to be based. And if you really don't think people care, then tell me why the names of the actors who play parts in science fiction are known while the names of actual scientists who make discoveries are not known?

Just so you understand, this is only the case in the US. It is very much the result of how the press reports on science. It is not the result of some general trend in human thought about science. It is also fairly new. You yourself mentioned Eli Whitney. Einstein's name is a household item. This is all a result of how scientists were genuinely liked years ago. We went through a cultural period of thinking of scientists as "mad scientists" if they were good at what they did.

And it's not as if science itself was such a boring topic. People will memorize and talk about sports statistics (which are of no consequence) and talk about athletes as if they new them even if they never met them. But the same is not true of science and scientists. Why? Exclusively because of the press. Slashdot editors should know better.

No one was even discussing whether it was accurate or not. It's just not the topic of the conversation. The topic that I set was the dehumanization of scientists by the way the headlines which describe their accomplishments are structured in pop media.

If the headline goes from least personal info to most personal, it dehumanizes those described. If goes from most personal to least personal, it humanizes them. This is not a singular occurrence. This is a general communication principle. The headline was 3 Irish girls (notices least personal, the country of origin, was listed first).

You don't have to debunk them. People who demonize Monsanto classify themselves as ass holes on their own. They don't have enough credibility to need debunking.

First the name, then the age, then the gender, then the country of origin. The way you put it (country of origin, gender, NO NAME) makes her sound irrelevant. You are part of the problem of how science is reported in the US. It's first and foremost a human endeavor. The less personal you make her achievement sound the less glamorous you make the scientific work at large. Compare this to how you report on any politician or movie actor and you'll see the problem.

Maybe. Background? Absolutely. Tim Bray often attributes this

to Phil Karlton. But he does it so often that it is usually attributed to Tim Bray. Naming things is where the code monkeys usually fail. Engineers who think they are programmers usually fail at it hard. It takes a certain fluidity and realization of how actual human beings interact with the world to give content meaningful context (by naming it right) and to understand problem domains well-enough to pick the right cache invalidation schemes. And, of course, understanding how human beings interact with the world is what one gets out of a liberal arts degree. As I said, it doesn't have to be a degree, but the background has to be there.

Reagan was happy, he was always smiling

They asked him, "what about the defiicit?"

He said, "there is no deficit!"

They told him, "but there is!"

So he said, "so there is."

...

30 years later

There is is no emal theft! But there is!.... waaaait for it.

C most definitely has the limitation which C++ tried to address and failed. Return should have been a pointer to the address where the returned value ends up being copied when it's popped off the stack. Instead it's just a syntactic premature end of a function. Had it been a simple pointer to the place where the function's return value ends up being copied, C++ would not have been invented because it would have been unnecessary. I am talking about the semantic that is present in Matlab functions (where you can assign to the return value directly). C++ tried to address it by having "this" pointer, but it ended up mixing the data and the functions which operate on it. Which is why its syntax will never be simple.

For example

int a = f();

should allow f to assign directly to the memory location where 'a' is. Like I said, there are obvious work arounds. You can pass the address of a to f() instead of doing direct assignment. But it break the semantics. And it reduces readability. And human time is more important than computer time, so readability is more important than slight loss of efficiency in execution.

The problem is that once 'a' is not an int anymore, but is a complicated structure, you are stuck. And if you still don't think that's a problem, try implementing a fully-efficient (no redundant copying or inquiries) discriminated union in either C or C++. Good luck! Your easiest solution at that point is to just generate the code in some text generating language. But if each function had access to the point of return, it would be trivial. Oh, and discriminated unions are all of networking and all of data management.

I guess I won't.

Hhm... to ad hominem or not to ad hominem that is the question that preoccupies us. Whether it is nobler, in the mind, to suffer the slings of mud of outrageous statements or to take aim and by opposing them thus end them.

The full amount of what you don't know and the years of experience that you lack to make the judgement that you made would take a volume of a flame war to fight out.

C and C++ are about as relevant today as assembly. If you don't understand that C++ template mechanism and C pre-processor are nothing but compile-time text generation tools with arcane unwieldy syntax, then you have no place making judgement. There are better tools to generate the same code that both of these end up generating. The better tools capture what you want to express without being bound by the arcane syntax of C. And unless you think that direct bit banging and micro assembly are the "real" CS (hint: they are not -- they engineering rather than CS), your argument is moot.

C++ is still (effectively rather than literally) generating C code at compile time. It's just not the step that needs to be taken directly. But all C++ symantics express nothing but generation of C code at compile time.

JavaScript (or any language in which string values and language symbols are interchangeable) is more important to know now than C. C can generated. And it's quickly getting to the point where that's all it's good for -- being auto generated. It is just text after all.

C and C++ no longer have any place in basic CS education. Sorry, we are at the point where it's more efficient to generate C than to write it. And since C++ is just generated C with really, really arcane syntax for this compile-time generation, C++ lost its purpose, too. There are more expressive (ie, easier to read) and less error-prone methods for generating C code now. It's finally becoming yesterday's news. The whole reason you see "resurgence" of C is that people are not writing it. They are generating it as an intermediate product. C is just text. And there are better ways to generate that text than the preprocessor or the C++'s template mechanism. C, however, has a major, major, major design flaw -- you can't assign to return values directly. So as a mechanism for expressing algorithms it has a natural inefficiency built into the language. It's not that there is no simple work around for it in C, it's that it needs a work around. It's over.

Really? I just thought that was something one picked at birth. No, really, is that even a form of knowledge? I just find these to be self evident. Often find it surprising that trivialities have names behind them when people start talking about them as fields of knowledge.