While there exists code that should never have been written, certainly YOU didn’t write it. So why are you reading this column rather than coding?
There’s been no end of angst-ridden polemic on why would-be writers suddenly fail to write. They face blank screens and pages seeking the ideal string sequences. Often there’s an insistent editor saying “Forget le mot juste, we want le mot Tuesday.” Such deadlines are counterproductive. Would you believe that many university “creative writing” degrees devote the odd seminar to avoiding the “writer block”?
Elitists such as Gore Vidal and John Updike, highly paid for conducting such courses, simply say “True writers are by definition never blocked. You have chosen the wrong profession.”
Indeed, Vidal once challenged his audience: “Why are you here rather than writing the American Novel?”
Modest computer-columnists face a different challenge. No block for us. A daily input of inter-nettoyage can fill our word count. We can list several URLs, some longer than the implied content!
As a last resort, we can do a book review or report on a recent conference.
Let me say that James A. Highsmith’s Adaptive Software Development (Dorset House, ISBN 0-932633-404-4) is one of few SD books that has kept me awake.
On the more personal front: Bobby Schmidt oft boasts of his baseball afflictions. I flew to Cardiff, Wales, to see the Liverpool 2, Arsenal 1 FA Soccer Cup Final. I was wearing my CUJ shirt. Up comes Anthony Moss among the 74K fans. Small world. He’s moving from C to C++ with Brit Aerospace.
The sports trivia (sez who?) expands into programming non-trivia. Anthony is amazed that I know Bjarne Stroustrup. Of course, this is all part of the show-biz name-dropping syndrome.
I tell Anthony that he must buy the Koenig/Moo Accelerated C++ (Addison-Wesley).
Stan Kelly-Bootle has been computing on and off since 1953 when he graduated from Cambridge University in Pure Mathematics and hacked on EDSAC I (the first true stored-program computer). He is a contributing editor for Linux Journal and a Jolt Judge for Software Development Magazine. With the demise of UNIX Review/Performance Computing, his 16-year-old Devil’s Advocate column has moved online to <www.sarcheck.com>. His many books include 680x0 Programming by Example, Mastering Turbo C, Lern Yerself Scouse, The Devil’s DP Dictionary, The Computer Contradictory, and Unix Complete. Under his nom-de-folk, Stan Kelly, his songs have been recorded by Cilla Black, Judy Collins, the Dubliners, and himself. Stan welcomes email via skb@atmail.net and his website <http://www.feniks.com/skb/>. Stan’s ramblings can also be found at <www.unixreview.com>.