Posts by nzok

Eggheads have found a positive link between the number of racist tweets and the number of racist hate crimes in US cities

Re: Anti-racism is false morality

New Zealand settlers did not eradicate the original inhabitants, nor did they attempt to. On the contrary, they happily sold weapons to them and intermarried. About a sixth of the population are of Maori descent and the proportion is steadily rising. According to the official figures, the Maori population remained stable for about sixty years after serious British settlement began and then started moderately rapid growth, which has continued uninterrupted. I make no comment on other counties, but you are dead wrong about this one.

US nuke arsenal runs on 1970s IBM 'puter waving 8-inch floppies

Re: Some Department of Commerce weather alert systems use Fortran

I have copies of three Global Circulation Models and fragments of a fourth.

I also have some Radio Astronomy codes. All of these are written in Fortran.

Since modern Fortran is a modular free-format programming language with

good support for structured programming, user-defined types, even OOP,

overloading, pointers, and bindings for MPI and OpenACC,

with compilers that are good at vectorising and some compilers that even

compile traditional code into GPU code, if you have a problem that needs

lots of number-crunching you would have to have a very good reason to use

something else. Price is not the issue: gfortran is free and good. Tools are

not the issue: there are static checkers and things that plug into Eclipse.

There are quite a few people learning Fortran.

Unfortunately, most of them seem to be hard-science PhD students with no

knowledge of software engineering and no sense of taste, so the code is

often, um, not as good as it could be. But that's really not Fortran's fault.

Fortran makes it quite easy to write clean maintainable code. It also makes

it easy to make a real mess, although in that area it still cannot compete

with C++.

It's not really fair to compare Fortran to Javascript or Ruby.

A fair comparison would be to things like R, NumPy/SciPy, Matlab, Octave, or Julia,

all of which can link in Fortran modules, so that you can get the best of both worlds.

The COBOL standard has been revised less often than the Fortran standard, but

it *has* been modernised, and there is a GnuCOBOL compiler (formerly OpenCOBOL)

that has caught up with much of COBOL 2014. Considering that the less you touch

an existing program, the fewer bugs you introduce, there's an economic case to be

made for paying someone to learn COBOL -- which is not particularly hard -- rather

than rewriting. Again, there is more COBOL support for Eclipse than you might

have expected.

Your top five dreadful people the Google manifesto has pulled out of the woodwork

Re: RTFM

"ST" says "The author of the memo under discussion wants to ... abolish diversity efforts." It is possible that he does, but he doesn't say that anywhere in the memo. It would be *so* nice if we could have an honest debate about what the guy *actually* wrote instead of making stuff up.

Having watched Jordan Peterson interview Damore, I have to say that he sounds more naïve than anything else. Certainly it was naïve to think that people with power and privilege at Google would tolerate dissent.

(For the record, 28% of the staff in my department are women, and all of them got in on merit.)

Re: Screw the statistics. I'd use the best people I can find to do the job.

Where do you get the idea that "Damore can't see that diversity is important in creating quality projects"? His very first sentence is "I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don't endorse stereotypes." Later he says "I ... suggest some ways to increase women's representation in tech". Later again he says "I hope it's clear that I'm not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn't try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of (sic.) those in the majority".

Where in the entire memo is there ANYTHING that suggests Damore "can't see that diversity is important"?

Far from attacking diversity, Damore's memo is an argument for (amongst other things) a more diverse diversity. "My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don't fit a certain ideology. ... Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity."

The twitterati that HCV quoted either couldn't be buggered to read the memo before mouthing off about it or were deliberately lying.

Re: Thumb on the scale

Concerning the quote "He has never had to build an objective, evidence-based argument for something other than programming a logic machine", Damore has a PhD in systems biology. Not programming.