[extropy-chat] The Internet: a commie, socialist conspiracy!

[Samantha Atkins]

On Nov 22, 2005, at 3:50 PM, Rik van Riel wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Nov 2005, Jack Parkinson wrote:
>
>
>> Some interesting observations and opinions from Slate magazine. In  
>> a world
>> ruled by profit-focused business - the Internet could never have  
>> arisen...
>>
>
> While I do not agree with Eric Raymond very often, he couldn't
> have said things better when he came up with:
>
>     "All of us are smarter than any of us"

Yep.  It took massive collaboration to come up with Relativity.    
Eric Raymond took something cool to a broken extreme.

>
> Progress is made through collaboration, sharing ideas with
> each other and incrementally improving on each other's ideas.
>

Breakthroughs do not come from this mechanism apparently.  Granted  
steady improvements can come from this as well as coverage of some  
area of work.

> Suggesting that the scientific principles of publication and
> peer review are detrimental to engineering is nothing short
> of ludicrous, in my opinion.
>

What kinds of peer review and what types of engineering?  Peer review  
is not at all the same as claiming that "all of us are smarter than  
any of us".


> -- 
> "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
> Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
> by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan
>

If you truly write the code cleverly then you have shown every  
component is bug free as you went and by cleverly avoiding or  
severely limiting side-effects it then follows that the composite  
result doesn't need much debugging.   Of course many popular  
languages make it rather difficult to write code this cleverly.

- samantha