[erlang-questions] Erlang web servers challenge

Tue Jul 12 12:07:27 CEST 2011

Thanks Joe for sharing this paragraph. Reading bulk of black and white pages
had never been a problem for me, but how to use , ; - -- in a paragraph.
With this paragraph, I understood that as well ;-)

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 4:24 PM, Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 2:13 AM, Richard O'Keefe <ok@REDACTED>
> wrote:
> >
> > On 9/07/2011, at 2:44 AM, Ulf Wiger wrote:
> >> Having said this, I invite anyone who goes through that kind of exercise
> to share their results. Not only will it help you evaluate the experiment
> honestly; it will increase the store of experiments that can be copied and
> tailored to the specific challenges of the next project.
> >
> > I had an unpleasant experimental experience of my own last year.
> > Let me first give you the lesson I learned, and then the background.
> >
> > LESSON: Expect your experiment to surprise you,
> >        probably by showing the experiment was a waste of time.
> >
> > Background: I'm sick of arguments about style.  To my mind, it is so
> > obvious that baStudlyCaps isAVeryStupidWayToWriteIndeed and I
> > cannotUnderstandWhyOtherPeopleDoNotSeeThat.  But they don't.  My zeroth,
> > the New Zealand Anglican Church has even brought out an electronic
> > version of the liturgy called WePray, in a desperate attempt to seem
> > hip.  (Since it is only available for an operating system sold by what
> > may be the largest software company to have been convicted to software
> > piracy, I wonder what their ethics committee were doing.  But I digress.)
> >
> > So I devised a little language called Chatterton
> > (http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/cosc345/chatterton.pdf),
> > which allowed me to mechanically produce several style variants of
> > some sample programs and ask some 3rd year software engineering students
> > to find some mistakes in them.
> >
> > What I expected was one of three things:
> >  - no measurable effect
> >  - more readable code (i.e., NOT baStudlyCaps) being easier to fix
> >  - more familiar (i.e., JustLikeXingJava) being easier to fix.
> >
> > What I *got* was students telling me they couldn't read code on
> > paper; they needed syntax-colouring IDEs (the listings all fitted
> > on a single sheet of paper and used black-and-white styling) and
> > ideally a debugger so they could find mistakes by stepping through
> > the code.  I also got students telling me that it was horribly
> > unreasonable of me to expect them to read a 30-page manual; NOBODY
> > could read that much.
>
> Oh dear - Attention deficiency syndrome - I suspect, though cannot
> prove, that is is
> a consequence of our brains being constantly bombarded with irrelevant
> information.
>
> The cure is simple: You set reading them off Proust for a few hours a
> day with no interruptions.
>
>
> (for example: from
> Cities of the Plain
> (Sodom et Gomorrhe)
> [Vol. 4 of Remembrance of Things Past--
> (À la Recherche du temps perdu)])
>
>
> "Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only
> until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that
> of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every
> theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging,
> unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill
> like Samson and saying like him: "The two sexes shall die, each in a
> place apart!"; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster
> when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round
> Dreyfus, from the sympathy--at times from the society--of their
> fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as
> they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them,
> accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in
> themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling
> their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by
> association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry,
> asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of
> beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the
> Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their
> race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated
> pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most
> directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning
> their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also
> brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that
> strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having
> finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel,
> with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes
> beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with
> which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the
> opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps
> upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society
> of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much
> so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of
> which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the
> fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to
> injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to
> excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of
> appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in
> recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim
> that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no
> abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before
> Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed
> to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every
> example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so
> peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be
> accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which
> exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith,
> vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality
> of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and
> less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity
> of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic,
> glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to
> know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or
> conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of
> his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose
> carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his
> daughter's hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence,
> in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse;
> all of them obliged to protect their own secret but having their part
> in a secret shared with the others, which the rest of humanity does
> not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable
> tales of adventure seem true, for in this romantic, anachronistic life
> the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a
> certain independence of action with which his aristocratic breeding
> has furnished him, and which the trembling little cit would lack, on
> leaving the duchess's party goes off to confer in private with the
> hooligan; a reprobate part of the human whole, but an important part,
> suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and
> unpunished, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its
> adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in
> the prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great
> extent, in a playful and perilous intimacy with the men of the other
> race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of
> something alien to it; a game that is rendered easy by the blindness
> or duplicity of the others, a game that may be kept up for years until
> the day of the scandal, on which these lion-tamers are devoured; until
> then, obliged to make a secret of their lives, to turn away their eyes
> from the things on which they would naturally fasten them, to fasten
> them upon those from which they would naturally turn away, to change
> the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary, a social
> constraint, slight in comparison with the inward constraint which
> their vice, or what is improperly so called, imposes upon them with
> regard not so much now to others as to themselves, and in such a way
> that to themselves it does not appear a vice."
>
> One they have got used to reading sentences like this that ramble on
> for a few pages without getting anywhere
> in particular they will find a 30-page manual easy going.
>
> /Joe
>
>
> > And finding a definition of an identifier
> > in a 2-page listing is just beyond human capacity; it's impossible
> > to do that without the machine assistance of an IDE.
> >
> > So the whole experiment produced no worthwhile data for reasons having
> > nothing to do with what I thought I was testing.
> >
> > As other people have been saying, the "Erlang web servers challenge"
> > is at serious risk of producing no worthwhile data.
> >
> >
> >
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