What HOLY BLOOD WARS exist in your profession?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
141

In the mid-1980’s (IIRC), there was a profoundly demented Supreme Court interpretation of the word “and” as used in the Eighth Amendment:

It was an appeal of a ruling in a (utterly frivolous, IMHO) “cruel and unusual punishment” case. The appellant, a prisoner, claimed that his 8th Amendment rights were violated because he wasn’t allowed to watch TV in prison. It just doesn’t get much crueler than that. :rolleyes: I’ll be damned if I can imagine why the Supreme Court even took the case.

Anyway, IIRC, the SC ruled that the Amendment says that a punishment must be simultaneously both cruel and unusual, for it to be prohibited. (Sorry, I don’t recall and can’t guess which of these criteria the TV-less prison was imagined to violate, but apparently it didn’t violate both conditions.)

SO: It must be improper to burn prisoners at the stake because that is both cruel and unusual. But if we were to start burning prisoners regularly and often, then it would be perfectly acceptable. :smack:

142

“Can I get you some tea, or a biscuit?” - Doesn’t mean you’re actually limited to taking one, and in fact the two rather go together as a unit.

To continue in the hot beverage theme:

“Coffee? Cream or sugar?”

143

“Cream or sugar?”

– Yes, please.

“Both?”

– No. Just one.

144

That’s the inclusive or that I mentioned in the post (aka OR). I meant literally and meaning you’re being offered both or nothing.

145

Precisely. I was offering a couple of examples, as you said you couldn’t think of any off hand. :slight_smile:

146

I remember my algebra teacher in high school teaching us the logical meaning of the word “or”. She said something like, “now just because you’ve learned what it really means, next time you go to the drive thru and they ask ‘would you like fries or onion rings’ don’t just answer ‘yes’.”

:smiley:

147

Oil vs acrylic. Not so much a blood war, just both groups looking down their noses at each other while the watercolorists are busy muddying up their paper over in the corner and cursing their life choices.

148

This is why I’ve always chosen “mixed media” :smiley:

149

Although I don’t use it professionally, I do my hobby number-crunching with FreeBASIC, and they have been steadily derating the GOSUB / RETURN as ‘bad programming practice’. No, it’s exactly analogous to the (6502) assembler instructions of JTS / RTS (which is the first programming language I learned). It’s not bad programming practice to use it for subroutines, it is just that idiots can abuse it for bad programming practices. The things they introduced to replace the GOSUB / RETURN, although they force the programmer to use good programming practice, are far less clear than a properly formed GOSUB / RETURN subroutine when reading it months after you wrote it, when repurposing previously written code.

150

One problem in programming is mindless managers who think that every function needs to be commented even if it is self-explanatory, leading to use of the so-called “Bukazoid Documentation Pattern” that looks like this:

//Gets a username from a user repository.
//parameters:
//userId: Type: Guid. Purpose: The userid of the user that you want to get the username of
//userRepository: Type: UserRepository. Purpose: The repository that you want to use to get the username of the userid that you passed as the userid parameter
//Effects: Calls the repository referenced by userRepository to obtain the username of the user referred to by userId.
//Returns: Type: string. Holds the username of the user whose userid is userId according to the user repository pointed to by userRepository.
string GetUsernameFromUserRepository(Guid userId, UserRepository userRepository)
{
//Call userRepository to get the username of the user referenced by userId.
string username = userRepository.GetUsername(userId);
Log the request to retreive the username of the user referenced by userId in the singleton log available through LogManager under the log entry type of GetUsernameFromUserRepository.
LogManager.LogRequest(RequestType.GetUsernameFromUserRepository, userId);

//clear all references so that they can be garbage collected sooner
userId = null;
userRepoisitory=null;

//Return the userid that we obtained from the repository in pursuit of the objective of this method
return username;

}

151

[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:119, topic:658300”]

I think the greatest HOLY BLOOD WAR in the book business is the traditional publishing vs. self-publishing war.

To traditionalists, there is one and only one financial model for authors: money always flows FROM the publisher TO the author. Authors do not pay editors, cover designers, proofreaders, copy editors, illustrators, indexers, or designers. The publisher pays everything.

To self-publishers, the author pays all of the costs up front, does far more of the work, and keeps far more of the money. The author also does virtually all marketing.

From a bookseller’s perspective, self publishing (well, vanity presses and POD these days) seems to be entirely about eliminating all proofreading, fact checking, and professional design – and then reducing the discounts to distributors and bookstores. Oh, and cheap covers that curl up if you look at them funny.
[/QUOTE]

In academia, there’s also a big resistance to “competency based” programs that don’t care if you went through a traditional program with admissions applications and required classroom time hours and long nights doing homework problems and movie night on the quad, concentrating instead on whether or not you actually know the material involved in the program, and if you don’t, shows you your gap analysis and teaches you just that, and for-profit models where anyone can pay to be taught whatever knowledge and skills they want and if they can show that they actually learned it and can demonstrate the skills expected of graduates, they get the degree/certificate/whatever. If you weren’t good enough to get admitted to a highly prestigious program or you didn’t have the time to attend, pity you, what you know and can do means squat. People point out that there have been allegations that some of these newfangled programs might not be as rigorous and conclude that the whole thing is just a dollars for degrees scam.

152

I looked through some of my documentation for a program and found a “strange” use of the word “or”.

“The type of the returned value is engine.Data, or the empty interface, so don’t forget to cast to the correct type before using it.”

In this case, engine.Data is an alias for interface{} (long story). “Or” means AKA here. You could make an argument that logically it’s a superfluous logical OR that always evaluates to true (value.(type) == engine.Data || value.(type) == interface{}), but it really has very little relation to the logical “OR” (or “XOR”) at all, and in fact I’d argue that its meaning is closer to AND, or perhaps even an assertion of equality or entailment (value.(type) == engine.Data ⊨ value.(type) == interface{}).

153

I’ll be fair and say that package/file-level, class-level, and function-level documentation can sometimes be excused when they’re obvious because documentation programs/generators (eg godoc, javadoc) usually omit the code. So if you have a method called SetValue(value int) it can be useful to have it in the documentation whether it simply sets the value to the argument or if it does some sort of normalization or bounds checking because somebody might be using a documentation generator and not using the actual files. There’s really no excuse at the line-level though.

154

RACF has had the PROTECTALL option for quite some time now, which essentially makes it operate the same as ACF2.

Really, all three products do a fine job. And they do it better than security on any other platform.

155

Real geologists as opposed to mere geophysicists.

156

This.

And Times New Roman vs. the HIDEOUS Arial font. (Luckily TNR usually wins, as it’s the industry standard, but there are a few mavericks out there…sigh).

157

Knuth’s Computer Modern is the best font. Ever. Period.

I am in no way a graphic designer.

158

You mean you haven’t run into the “I’ll do it my way because it’s The. Right. Way. and no I won’t change just because someone else did it the wrong way in the file and no I won’t fix their mess because I have Better Things to do with My Time” type?

159

Apparently some writer for Wired reads the Dope.

160

You’ll still find regional and cultural differences in interpretation. This then can snowball into “including, but not exclusive to, X, unless Y is optional…” convoluted narrative.

My preference is a “style definitions” section in a document that explicitly defines “OR” vs “or” usage. You’d be amazed how many engineers and programmers somehow either skipped Boolean logic, or didn’t pay attention to it.

Now let me tell you about the nightmares surrounding “may” vs “can” vs “should” vs “shall” :smiley: I need a beer just typing this…