Jordan Peterson is launching Thinkspot, a “free speech” platform where his fanboys can downvote posts they dislike and make them vanish

I’d forgotten about Admiral Hopper. Thanks for the reminder, Grumpy & Cheesy!

One last note about my friend – she worked at the main campus in Oregon, just west of Portland (the house we shared was in Portland & she took the bus out there everyday. When her girlfriend was out of town I would get up an hour early at 6:45 to help her get out the door).

The main campus was at that time a bit isolated from everything else (don’t know if it still is). They left some forest around it, etc. even though it was only a 5 minute drive from downtown Beaverton (one of Portland’s largest suburbs) and have a big “berm” of earth to make it so that it seemed rural, even though one corner (of the admittedly large campus) was at the intersection of two major roads, with a major suburban neighborhood right across one of those streets.

Because of the kinda-sorta isolation it was inconvenient to walk off campus to get lunch anywhere, so the cafeteria was particularly nice for a corporate cafe and even the execs would eat there some times.

But what really blew my mind (because I did not know all this at first) was that famous athletes would eat in the cafeteria all the time, and she had had lunch with Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm and a bunch of other people I forget. She didn’t get to know them or anything, and she saw Jordan a lot more than she ever talked to him (he was at the campus often enough during the off-season, but he was usually busy talking business during lunch with someone from some other department, prob. advertising or clothing design), but at least once he sat at her table & she got to talk to him. She had lunch with Mia Hamm & a couple other women from the US national soccer team I don’t know how many times, but a lot more than once. It was enough that apparently Hamm remembered her name and noticed when she switched wheelchairs, asking how she liked the new one.

As my friend was a lesbian living in an all queer-women household who talked about Hamm’s shirt-doffing theatrics more than a few times, we were all very, very impressed.

I’d like to believe she’s cool enough to also be in Star Trek. She’s pals with Captain Janeway!

IMO, COBOL is a great example of contempt culture in action: look at this definition of the language from the Jargon File, the kind of ur-Urban Dictionary of hacker slang (curated, BTW, by one Eric S. Raymond who has previous form on this site). The contempt drips from nearly every word: “weak”, “verbose”, “flabby”, “mindless”, etc.

I never learned COBOL myself but I did work for a company who had a lot of COBOL code in their billing system (also in PL/I, IBM’s attempt at One Language To Rule Them All™ that would unite the COBOL-using business world and the FORTRAN-using engineering/scientific world but which ultimately fizzled out into a historical curiosity, but that’s another story). Imagine my surprise ? when I discovered that the COBOL programmers were not the mindless drones of the Jargon File but competent professionals! My response to people who shit on COBOL pretty much became, “yeah, and what do you think prints your pay cheque?”

@Jackson, the reason I don’t think you hear so much about COBOL anymore (except for the occasional panic-piece in the IT press when someone realises all the COBOL programmers are retiring or dying of old age and a good chunk of the modern world that we take for granted still runs on it) is that in its domain, most of the hard problems have been solved. Some COBOL code has been running now for close on half a century: the obvious bugs have long been found and stamped out (of course, when a non-obvious bug or Outside Context Problem– thanks, Iain M. Banks– like Y2K shows up, then it tends to be non-trivial and we need people like Crip Dyke’s late friend to come sort it out). New trends in COBOL program design and implementation technique are unlikely to appear at this point: the language has reached a point of stability and maturity few other languages enjoy. COBOL developers don’t need to hang out on Stack Overflow all day because the hard problems were solved long ago, which is why COBOL doesn’t appear on peoples’ radars very often anymore, but it’s there behind the scenes, quietly doing its job. Of course, this is anathema to the hacker mindset who value change and virtuouso programming for its own sake over, you know, delivering actual value to customers… the average team of COBOL programmers can probably design, code, debug and deliver a system before modern programmers have finished arguing over what dependency injection container or other shiny thing de jour that interests them right now.

The common criticisms of COBOL you hear are mostly strawmen. Hackers have an appreciation of programming languages that can act as their own compilers– when creating a new language, one builds a compiler for a subset of the new language in another high-level language, then you use that compiler to bootstrap your language to the point where you can write a full compiler in itself (what’s called “self-hosting”). Because COBOL’s file I/O is geared towards reading records of data (you know, being a business oriented language and all; it’s in the name, guys) and not binary files, few implementations of COBOL could be used to write a COBOL compiler. While the notion of writing a programming language in itself has a certain compelling intellectual perversity, it’s a bit irrelevant if the language’s intended job is something altogether different– complaining that COBOL can’t implement itself is like complaining that your car can’t travel underwater. The other complaint you hear about COBOL is that it’s not block-structured like modern languages. This was popularised by Algol, the first version of which came several years after the first COBOL compilers appeared. Again, this like complaining that while John Logie Baird and Philo T. Farnsworth may have invented the TV, they obviously suck because they didn’t invent the remote control and surround sound while they were at it! At the time COBOL and FORTRAN were invented, it was still an open question whether compilers were possible at all, and the whole concept faced a considerable uphill battle to prove that high-level languages could compete with hand-tuned assembly language code, even if they did remove a lot of the busywork involved in programming “on the metal”. Another complaint one hears is that COBOL (at least its early versions; they’re probably long deprecated now) contains some downright unsafe constructs that essentially allowed you to write self-modifying code, a debugging nightmare and something nobody does if they can avoid it. IMO, given the underpowered nature of the machines the first versions of COBOL ran on, I’m not surprised such a thing was put in the language, dangerous as it was: self-modifying code is often used as an optimisation technique of last resort when you can’t otherwise fit a program in a constrained environment.

One story I heard about COBOL’s creation (that I’ve not seen verified but rings true based on what I know about large organisations) is that most of its flaws are political, not technical. The US Government wanted a common business language so that it could source computers from multiple manufacturers and have its programs run on them all. The manufacturers, of course, wanted to lock customers onto their own platforms but they knew that if they outright broke ranks it would look bad. So of course the howl went up that the standardisation process was taking too long, it was holding back innovation, etc. Admiral Hopper made the best of a bad situation, releasing a standard for a language that worked well enough but was maybe not the most elegant in time to stall any breaking of ranks. If she and her team had had more time to polish the design, it might have been a more elegant language but that’s how these things happen in the real world.

Wow, that was a long post! I’ll leave you with an interview the woman herself did with that impertinent whippersnapper, David Letterman (starts about 30 seconds in) ?:

Reading stories on here about women’s experiences with computer science and other male-dominated fields makes me wish sometimes that humanity were more like hyenas in terms of sex and gender.

@rv97: If you want to get really furious about the treatment of women in IT ?, Rachel Kroll’s blog is a good¹ read. Kroll is an Operations/ Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) who has worked for Google and others and her blog has many war stories about narrowly-averted disasters where large-scale systems have melted down on her watch and she had to restore them to working order… and in a depressing number of cases, said meltdowns are a direct result of her advice being overlooked simply because she is a woman. ☹️

Another good one is Ellen Ullman’s memoir Close to the Machine. It’s not entirely about the treatment of women in IT, more a discourse on the mindset possessed by computer programmers generally and our often-problematic relationship with Real Life™ (for example, it opens with her description of working in “crunch mode” on a project, in a windowless basement where the team members lose all track of time and are subsisting on pizza deliveries, an experience many programmers, both men and women, are unfortunately all too familiar with). And it describes her romantic relationship with one particular guy who is the absolute paradigm of the Valley tech-bro: a libertarian douchebag completely uninterested in the legal or moral implications of his work, except insofar as they might be thought of as a “cool hack” on the legal system.

@Ohlmann: Your comment about the “tabs vs spaces” holy war reminds me of a (non-programmer) friend of mine who was watching Silicon Valley or Halt and Catch Fire or one of those shows (I haven’t watched either) where the “tabs vs spaces” business was a plot point of one of the episodes. He was like, “they made that up for the show, right? No-one gets exercised over that, surely?” and I was like, “oh, my sweet summer child, you have no idea!” ?

¹ For certain values of “good”. Edit: hacker humour. Reading it back, it might sound dismissive of Kroll which I totally don’t intend: she’s an excellent writer.

Awww! It’s filled with cuteness and hate! I must pet it!

Also, I honestly cannot say I know much about the older programming languages, other than what they were used for. My involvement in CS is pretty focused towards physics ends. Still, I appreciate all of that knew information! Any day’s a good day to learn something new.

Crip Dyke’s story was just great. I love hearing stories like that. Women are treated so badly in male dominated fields like IT, and it’s great to hear of a badass woman forcing them to respect her or face the consequences.

I can also identify with the disability part; since I was partially disabled a few years ago and more recent health problems have finished the job, so there’s that. That great COBOL programmer probably would have been treated better, even with her disability, if she were male. The disability was just another thing they’d treat her with contempt for.

Also also also, I think I’ll give that memoir a read, though probably in small chunks to let my faith in humanity get its grip on the cliff edge again.

@Hester
You’re definitely right about the heavy presence of faux-intellectual right wingers. There were a sizable number of people that, when they got to choose topics, would argue against such things as welfare, feminism, LGBTQ rights, the existence of transgender people, the secular state, women in the military, and such. They always used absolutely terrible, fallacious arguments and dipped heavily into tactics like Gish gallops to try to win, then pretended they had won some great intellectual contest if they were successful. They’d also be assigned topics like these if they didn’t get to choose, because it’s Idaho.

For context as to what some of these arguments might’ve been like, my last year of debate was in 2016. Shudder.

Fortunately, my friend group was always self selected to consist of the most liberal people in a very conservative part of a very conservative state, so I didn’t have to deal with the right-winger-convinced-they’re-a-genius brand of asshole very often.

I was openly bisexual, atheist, very liberal, and feminist, though, so they very frequently tried to debate me.

Also, there is no thing like totally uncensored, unbiased information source. One way or another they are hierarchised at the very least, with some being censored in almost all case. You just can choose how you do that, and “mob’s rules” while democratic isn’t inherently the best system.

I am not sure that Peterson is aware of that. He do seem quite the guillible type.

It seems like his platform will be a chaotic hell hole, but I doubt he’ll let power over it out of his grip and let the mob rule it. With the requirement of a subscription fee, a built in way to censor dissent, and his administrative power, he’s well set the dominate it. The only “free” thing about it is that it won’t have any rules other than that Jordan Peterson’s word is law.

I’m sure he knows that his service won’t a free speech Mecca, it’s just a smokescreen for what he really wants: a place filled with sycophants and free of any dissent, with none of the rules against abusive and illegal content that other social media services might place on him.

@Jackson: If you’re interested in the history of computing and the development of programming languages, there’s a few books I can recommend. There’s Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine (which IIRC won Kidder the Pulitzer Prize) about the development of a new Data General minicomputer (i.e., the machines that filled the power slot between the original mainframes and the newer microcomputers), and Steven Levy’s Hackers which focuses on 3 episodes in IT history: the original hackers at MIT and Stanford in the 50s and 60s; the first microcomputer start-ups in Silicon Valley in the 70s; and the nascent video game industry in the 80s (if games are your thing, there’s also David Sheff’s Game Over about how an obscure Japanese manufacturer of playing cards called Nintendo became a games giant). Finally, there’s Georgina Ferry’s A Computer Called LEO which describes the development of the Lyons Electronic Office, arguably the first application of computers to business rather than military uses. Lyons were a chain of teashops in Britain who, at the prompting of a particularly far-sighted member of their staff in the 50s, hired away a bunch of Cambridge mathematicians (there being no “computer scientists” as of yet) to build a computer for them for payroll and inventory management. It’s a rather unusual tale when you consider that, at the time, the US was building computers to model things like fallout from nuclear explosions, whereas the UK was using them to make sure tea and cakes were delivered on time to cafes! ?

Another good read is British computer scientist Tony Hoare’s Turing Award acceptance speech (which you can find online) about his experiences building an Algol compiler and the distress at trying to implement a spec that grew with every revision (the first version of Algol, Algol 60, was an extremely elegant and very influential language but deficient in some areas, which lead to implementers adding their own extensions that defeated the purpose of having a standard in the first place. The attempt to build its successor, Algol 68, fell into what Fred Brooks¹ later called “the second system effect”; that is, where the standards committee fell into a “this time, we’re gonna do it right!” mindset that pretty much buried the language under an avalanche of unnecessary features, to the point where actually producing a full implementation of the language became next to impossible. A cautionary tale that’s still not fully appreciated).

¹ Brooks himself wrote the influential Mythical Man Month which is also a great read on how big software projects can go off the rails, though a lot of people (myself probably included) reckon it’s one of the “most read, least heeded” books on software development. ☹️

@Cat Mara
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ve actually heard of Hackers, so I think I’ll check it out. It sounds quite interesting!

@Jackson:

See also:
The argument between CamelCase and camelCase

The version with the initial capital is sometimes called “Pascal case” as it was popularised in that language.

The following names are common, though the last two are kind of rare:

PascalCase

camelCase

snake_case

kebab-case (very few languages use this as most would interpret the hyphen as a minus sign; the only ones I know that use it are the Lisp family of languages and Microsoft’s PowerShell)

And, of course, the latter two can come in all lowercase, all UPPERCASE, or Initial Capital varieties. Standards, they’re great! ?