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Autocoding evolves from........

Huaiyu Zhu huaiyu at gauss.almadan.ibm.com
Thu Feb 7 16:04:50 EST 2002 
On Wed, 06 Feb 2002 09:48:10 -0800, Jeff Shannon <jeff at ccvcorp.com> wrote:
>
>The problem you're running into, is that you've failed to convince anyone that
>*you* understand the real problems involved, enough to be able to solve them.  You
>don't need to convince us of the benefits of autocoding; you need to convince us
>of *your* competence.  So far, you're failing miserably.

He has several other major problems:

1. He seems to be unable to differentiate and respond well to negative
   comments.  He treats them all equally, and replies to the more negative
   ones with more enthusiasm.  Can he tell the difference between the
   following comments?  "I don't understand."  "I's already done."  "It
   can't be done."  "Yeah, that'll be good, but I don't think you've got the
   right approach to do it."  Sometimes he can't even see a humor.

2. He seems to claim that he has already abstracted all of computing into
   his nine commands, yet he also claims that this vision of his is
   impossible to be put into words, examples or mathematics.  That's kind of
   contradictary since the art of programming, or much of science itself, is
   to figure out exactly how things behave, and how to make things work as
   desired.  It is the art of collecting and summarizing details, to
   formulize and abstract them, to articulate and communicate them.

3. He misunderstood the mechanism of Open Source projects.  These projects
   exist because it is more efficient to do things that way.  A leader being
   a leader must have the ability to make things more efficient for others.
   He claims he knows the road ahead, but don't have the time to travel
   there.  So let's ask some hyperthetical questions.  Suppose there are
   twenty programmers willing to join his project.  Now he could achieve in
   a year or two what he would have done by himself in twenty years.  What
   are the tasks these programmers would be handling?  What are the most
   urgent theoretical problems to be solved?  What would be the codes he
   wants them to write in the first month?  Will he handle the final checkin
   and approval of code, and if so, what functionality and other criteria
   he'll use to judge them?  He seems to think that one man with a vision
   plus a million monkeys jumping on keyboards would solve real problems.

So with these problems in the way, it is not of much use communicating on
this topic.  The first and second problems also imply that there's not much
chance that any of these problems can be solved soon.

(Rue, if you are listening here, there's no need to respond.  We are not
sympathetic people here.  Programmers behave like Nazies here.)


Huaiyu
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