Thanks for the links. I'm pretty convinced that I "have" Avoidant Personality Disorder, in the sense that I fit the diagnostic criteria; I'm just not convinced it's a useful fact. However, I found a book in the books section on avoidantpersonality.com (Distancing by Martin Kantor) that makes the case for treating AvPD as a gestalt instead of as a collection of loosely related pathologies. I'll have to read it and see if I'm convinced.

As for therapy, you should research the legal dangers and get a grasp on the facts before using them as a reason to avoid therapy. Therapists see a lot of really screwed up, truly dangerous people. If they bothered getting people like us (avoidant, over thirty, no history of suicide attempts or major violence) committed for evaluation, they'd have to do it for the majority of their clients. That wouldn't be good for business.

But, you know, you are avoidant, and I've even seen non-avoidant people make weird excuses to avoid therapy. A doctor friend of mine claims he is afraid his medical license could be suspended if he entered therapy (despite the fact that he has no issues with violence, drug abuse, or personal integrity) or that he might be subject to investigation by the state licensing board. That doesn't even pass the laugh test -- probably half the doctors in every major city are in therapy, and for psychiatrists doing psychotherapy it's kind of a "best practice" to be in therapy oneself. I explained that to him, yet he still finds it a compelling reason to avoid therapy. So you're not in bad company if you're a little irrational that regard :-)

I know of Avoidant Personality Disorder and know I fit the diagnostic criteria, but aside from reading a few overviews I haven't researched it at all. I may have dismissed it prematurely, but it seemed like an arbitrary category that didn't carry any guidance for understanding or treating the condition. That probably reflects my bias: it seems to me that many psychiatric classifications are intuitive and convenient, but not supported by any theoretical or clinical justification. They're just invented to provide mental and linguistic frames of reference in an area where we can't discern any natural structure.

On the other hand, everything you said in your second paragraph except two things (testing friends' loyalty and making excuses to avoid going places with friends) is true of me, too, so maybe Avoidant Personality Disorder is a distinct disorder and not just an abritrary piece carved out of the pie. I should read more about it. Can you point me to anything?

Speaking of pointing people to places, get thee to a therapist, stat. You'll be glad you did. I got lucky and got a congenial one on the first try, but it's common and completely accepted to shop around a bit. If you have any doubts or questions about this, please ask. We can take the conversation to another channel if you want.

I did the hyphen-ass transform on that and got "like-ass burgers" which McDonald's will make sure you never have to give up.

The "other way" may be basically the same, except faster and more reliably without any awareness of what you've actually done. Plus it has a huge head start in development on the "conscious" version.

When I put it that way it sounds like a "mature black-box library vs. home-grown kludge" situation. However, I think a more common analogy is "specialized hardware vs. software simulation." (Sorry, I don't do cars.)

Be that as it may, I was describing Martin Luther King, Jr. Whatever loss, misery, and devastation he left behind him in his personal life, I think he comes off pretty well if you take a larger view.

Even worse, the popularity of Asperger's as a self-diagnosis among geeks prevents them from getting a better grasp on their problems. Many other causes can produce similar symptoms, and even when a diagnosis of Asperger's is accurate, it isn't the last word on a person's mental health. An Aspie can have other psychological problems.

For instance, I had long thought I might be an Aspie, and when I ended up in therapy, I waited to see if my therapist mentioned it. (On my first visit, I spotted a couple of books about Asperger's on her bookshelf, so I figured she would be a good check on my self-diagnosis.) After several visits she did mention that my description of my childhood experiences sounded like I could have Asperger's, and she knew an authority on Asperger's who could screen me. At the time, my health insurance wouldn't cover the screening (a couple thousand bucks,) so I basically asked, is the screening worth it? She said it would be interesting to have a more expert opinion on whether it was really Asperger's, but:

1. My current level of functioning didn't support a diagnosis, so the diagnosis would be retrospective.
2. My problems were at most indirectly related to Asperger's, in that I was deeply formed by my early social difficulties, whatever caused them.
3. Asperger's would be one factor among several traumatic influences in my childhood.
4. There was no particular question about my current condition that would be cleared up by a diagnosis of Asperger's.
5. All in all, the course of my therapy would be minimally affected by a diagnosis of Asperger's.

This from a therapist who had books about Asperger's on her shelf and who suggested I get screened for it without any prompting on my part. Clearly she was interested in Asperger's and knowledgable about it. She just didn't think it was that important for my further development.

Contrast that with the many geeks who (without any professional diagnosis) use Asperger's to wholly define their past experience and future potential.

As someone who manifested many Asperger's symptoms as a child, I remember thinking all the time, "It would be obviously better if everyone did X, but they don't, because they're stupid." And you know what? None of my insights did anybody a damn bit of good. Aspies are great at pushing forward some fields (such as computing,) but they fail badly at fields that require influencing other people. RMS is only a partial exception to this.

One example: Aspies are more ethically daring basically because they don't recognize a lot of the small-scale pain they cause. It's easy for them to see the social big picture because they don't see the social small picture. They don't hesitate to call for large changes because they don't understand the cost of the social and cultural disruption that large changes cause, or they dismiss them as irrelevant. Calling for change doesn't make it happen. You need people who can make changes happen by hacking the culture. For instance, Ghandi came up with a theory of nonviolent resistance that meshed perfectly with Hindu culture, while at the same time making it open to all Indians. Then Martin Luther King, Jr. adapted ideas from Ghandi and elsewhere to a completely different cultural context.

An Aspie in MLK's place would have said, "Look, these Indian guys totally kicked ass with this approach, and I know we're black and Christian but we just need to forget about that because this stuff FUCKING WORKS. I mean, this is so OBVIOUS and I can't believe you guys are getting hung up on the fact that these ideas seem a little alien. They make perfect sense in a Hindu context, and if you're interested in that I can recommend some scriptures. If you're not going to bother understanding it, then just SHUT THE HELL UP and let the smart people talk. What the hell is wrong with you fucking dickhead morons? I give up. I can't make it any more obvious than I already have. Why don't you just go and play basketball and be cool and have sex and all that stuff that's so much more important than the FREEDOM OF OUR RACE. Idiots."

Aspie-type people make valuable contributions to society (and I have to believe this or I'd just off myself) but Aspies are impotent in the face of many important problems. Sometimes the right guy for the job is someone who is really unattractive from a geeky point of view -- like a slick, charismatic, self-aggrandizing, womanizing minister.

A guy with a technical degree who goes straight into management is not a technical guy. He will start out as naive about technical issues as the average green hire and go downhill from there. We need people with ten years' technical experience moving into management.

SWT's performance varie depending on the toolkit used to implement it. Unfortunately, the GTK+ implementation is notoriously slow, and nobody outside IBM knows whether a Qt version will ever be released.

It's simpler to use something already built and tested, with known strengths and weaknesses, multiple mostly-compatible implementations available, tool support, and plenty of books and trained personnel to choose from, than to use a much simpler solution that is less well understood, or worse, one that I have to design and implement myself.

Or, to put it another way, why do the Chinese and Indians do business with each other in English when Esperanto would suffice?

Don't judge based on this article. The author's "young guys playing fast and loose" vs. "stuffy but reliable old guys" way of explaining things misses the point. Either he's a bad writer, or he doesn't know what he's talking about. A much better treatment can be found here.

Thanks for the tips. I'll take a look at lazy-lock. I don't know if the font-locking code even terminates on the problem files and don't have the patience to find out, so caching wouldn't help.

Just out of curiosity, since you're well-qualified to prognosticate, what do you foresee for Emacs? Will a more modern Lisp-based editor eventually displace Emacs, or will Emacs continue to eat its young until something totally different kills it?

What I meant by "RAM is cheap" is that on modern systems you'll only start swapping under pathological circumstances. The GP poster was worried that running two jobs concurrently would turn the disk into a bottleneck. His objection was framed around jobs with heavy disk I/O, but I also wanted to address the question of swapping, which was a valid a concern back in the days when switching from task #1 to task #2 could mean swapping in a bunch of code and data for task #2. These days, #2's code and data would be in memory somewhere, a much quicker trip than disk.

That seems to be the case to me, too. It's the applications that drop the ball. Emacs can get hung opening a large .cpp file if the macros confuse the parser used by the syntax highlighter. Why isn't that done in a separate thread so I can make my changes and close the file while the syntax highlighter flails in the background?

Short answer: only one thing I mentioned involved disk I/O, RAM is cheap, and application frameworks typically limit the number of jobs being run at one time.

If there's really a performance need to serialize tasks involving disk I/O, then go ahead and serialize them. Eclipse, the application framework I'm most familiar with, makes this straightforward: just define a scheduling policy that allows only one job to run at a time and apply that policy to all your disk I/O jobs. Other jobs will continue to be scheduled and run according to the default policy or whatever other policy you specify -- might as well get some work done while you're waiting for the I/O to complete.

Yeah, I agree. There are a few rare types of software that are naturally parallel or deal with concurrency out of necessity, such as GUI applications, server applications, data-crunching jobs, and device drivers, but basically every other kind of software is naturally single-threaded.

Wait....

Sarcasm aside, few computations are naturally parallelizable, but desktop and server applications carry out many computations that can be run concurrently. For a long time it was normal (and usually harmless) to serialize them, but these days it's a waste of hardware. In a complex GUI application, for example, it's probably fine to use single-threaded serial algorithms to sort tables, load graphics, parse data, and check for updates, but you had better make sure those jobs can run in parallel, or the user will be twiddling his thumbs waiting for a table to be sorted while his quad-core CPU is "pegged" at 25% crunching on a different dataset. Or worse: he sits waiting for a table to be sorted while his CPU is at 0% because the application is trying to download data from a server.

Your example of building construction is actually a good example in favor of concurrency. Construction is like a complex computation made of smaller computations that have complicated interdependencies. A bunch of different teams (like cores) work on the building at the same time. While one set of workers is assembling steel into the frame, another set of workers is delivering more steel for them to use. Can you imagine how long it would take if these tasks weren't concurrent? Of course, you have to be very careful in coordinating them. You can't have the construction site filled up with raw materials that you don't need yet, and you don't want the delivery drivers sitting idle while the construction workers are waiting for girders. I'm sure the complete problem is complex beyond my imagination. By what point during construction do need your gas, electric, and sewage permits? Will it cause a logistical clusterfuck (contention) if there are plumbers and eletricians working on the same floor at the same time? And so on ad infinitum. Yet the complexity and inevitable waste (people showing up for work that can't be done yet, for example) is well worth having a building up in months instead of years.