(2004-07-30) Programmers Stone

The Programmers Stone course by Alan G Carter and Colston Sanger aims to recapture, explore and celebrate the Art of Computer Programming. (Donald Knuth, TAOCP) (Hacker) Frustrating at times, but if you zoom through the parts that annoy you, you'll find plenty that resonates.

Many mappers seem to know several people who had suffered from ME (Chronic Fatigue/CFIDS), and we made a list. Yes, they were all energetic thinking people, and not the brash, anti-intellectual yuppies that were characterised as getting "yuppie flu". But further, they were all thinking people whose essentially gentle personalities led them to respond to acts of gross stupidity thrown with all the contempt a packer can muster with sadness, rather than say, anger or contempt. Poke a monkey with a stick for long enough and its hair will fall out. This is a physiological effect of sustained psychological cruelty. ME had appeared during a period when packer Fundamentalism had broken out all over the developed world, leading to enormous amounts of stupidity and cruelty. ME might well be an effect. But why just the gentle ones? They were all highly active, being the sort that would retile the barn because it was sunny, or cycle across Canada to celebrate their recovery, although they were all Day Dream-ers. Daydreaming couldn't be it anyway, because we are all daydreamers... and the penny dropped.

The difference between packers and mappers is that packers have been socially conditioned to suppress their natural faculty for building mental Model-s by daydreaming, and fall back on rote learning procedural, action oriented (Actionable?) responses instead. We could throw away the neurological black boxes, and just say "daydreaming" to make the bridge to mainstream language. Then the empirical work, as well as the understanding of the nature of the language problem, all fitted into place.

The philosophy bits draw on Systems Thinking, Complexity Theory, Teilhard De Chardin, Vernor Vinge, Magick...

A line that made me laugh: describing Eli Goldratt's books as Fairy stories about how our heros manage to think around M0 and solve problems, instead of being driven off site with their stuff in binliners, which is what would really happen.