March 2010 - Posts
An erstwhile colleague insisted on using that half-assed entity framework the SQL Server team was pushing in competition with LINQ.
Now he’s gone and I’m left with interminable layer upon layer of code that doesn’t actually do anything. It’s worse than COBOL!
This is a situation not dissimilar to what happens when people read Design Patterns and get religion. Older, more seasoned programmers recognise DP as simply a formal language for what expert programmers did, or intend to do.
Greener programmers get carried away and treat the use of design patterns as an objective in its own right. This always ends in tears, with stilted code that’s unmaintainable because it doesn’t speak of purpose.
The thing that gets my goat is that the mere existence of the web service neatly splits things into layers. Further layering adds nothing and makes the code hard to read.
I don’t care what colour you are, but I do care what creed.
David Horne was right when he said that tolerance doesn’t mean you have to love people, or even like them. However, he went on to say that it means you must accept that they are entitled to live in their own way.
Sure they are. But not in my backyard.
Many foreign cultures are aggressive meme-plexes very much inclined to cultural imperialism. It is not safe to tolerate them, for exactly the same reason that you do not allow lantana to establish a foothold on your property. Lantana is not evil, but if you don’t stamp it out it will take over and choke the life out of everything else. You don’t let it get established, and if if is established you remove it.
Australia has been very fortunate in doing all the right things until very recently. Horne was right that we did these things for appalling and sometimes absurd reasons, but doing the right thing for the wrong reason is still doing the right thing. Forced assimilation, colloquially known as “fit in or *** off” resulted in (for example) a million Greeks in Melbourne who think of themselves as Australians with Greek heritage, rather than Greeks surrounded by Australians. In Sydney we have in Leichardt the Italian version of the same thing. All these people are proud of their heritage while being quite certain they are Australian. They are absolutely not ghettos.
Small numbers of immigrants from any of the more benign cultures are fine; the parents may have an uncomfortable time but their children are soon thoroughly Australian, which greatly eases things for the parent by providing them with a cultural bridge.
Large numbers are another matter, especially when those large numbers arrive after the law changes to prohibit the general public from using social sanctions to enforce assimilation. If you don’t believe me I suggest you demonstrate the strength of your convictions by walking around Cabramatta after dark on your own. I for one have had enough of political correctness to the point where I will cheerfully vote for anybody who refuses to toe the politically correct line.
OK, a couple of facts:
- Australia is already overpopulated. It doesn’t matter what colour or creed you are are, we’re full, go away. We apologise for the idiocy of our government in encouraging you to come here.
- Contrary to Horne’s rather offensive assertion, Australians do have a culture. It’s a culture of privacy and quiet mateship, of looking after your friends and never telling tales out of school. It’s our traditional way, it’s our heritage.
- Some people think god wants them to wear a towel round their head. If these people think this is more important than our law that you have to wear a helmet on a motorcycle, they have an option. They can go live in a country that doesn’t have safety laws.
So what about tolerance? You don’t have to be mean to these people on their way out, and your traditional Aussie will go a long way to help someone who’s trying to fit in. It’s such a theme there was a whole string of funny books celebrating this scenario, by John O’Grady, starting with They’re a Weird Mob.
“There are no stupid questions” is bollocks. Most of my questions are stupid questions because if I knew the right question I wouldn’t need to ask. So I keep asking questions until one of them isn’t stupid. In the words of the immortal bard (or possibly Microsoft)…
This may take a few minutes.
A good teacher figures out what you know and what you don’t know, and nudges you toward the next good question. Answers to the questions, even the good ones, are almost incidental.
At the recent Females in Telecommunications & Technology luncheon to celebrate International Women's Day, MP Jodi McKay highlighted that only 1 in 5 Australians studying to work in ICT was female. In Sydney on 24 March, Microsoft will hosting Girls from Years 9-11 for the first Australian DigiGirlz day.
I suppose it’s nice that they care, but…
IT is indoors with no heavy lifting, and it has more to do with what you know than who you know. If women don’t do this it’s either because they don’t find it appealing or they secretly think they’d be bad at it.
Generally women are bad at IT for the same reason they’re bad at engineering disciplines: it requires analytical modes of thought that are not their primary mode of operation. This is not to say that women can’t do things analytical. I merely suggest that most women aren’t in the habit of thinking this way, and I should also point out that a lot of men fit this description and are equally unsuited to IT.
Analytically weak people (they like to call themselves people persons) generally end up in sales type roles, substituting interpersonal skills (lying and manipulation) for useful skills. These people often genuinely believe that if they say something frequently and sincerely enough, it will become true. What actually happens is that other people are too lazy to check, and just repeat the last thing they heard. This doesn’t work with computers or with the people who like working with them, and analytically weak people rapidly learn resentment of an environment that is inimical to their only talent.
Your archetypal computer geek does not intentionally repel girls. If he thinks about them at all it is to wish he knew how to attract them. For those who thrive in IT, everything they do and say is rooted in a context that makes analytically weak people feel bored, uneasy or even threatened. It is fair to say that people who are analytical of mind regard those who are not as being either mentally deficient or lazy, and frequently lack both the social skills and any inclination to mask their contempt, compounding the situation.
Girls don’t want to be in a dominantly analytical environment. It’s inimical to them. I’m quite impressed that they figure this out so young.