by
Peter Seibel
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[...] the other guy was programming the way he had wanted to program but with a different spin. So he saw what happens when one very intense, very good programmer doesn't segment it down. You get one very long program—it's not that the program was spaghetti code but there were just so many levels of complexity in this one linear suite. He almost pissed me off because, as I say, he went over my head to demand that the department had to have standards to not allow that thing to happen.
Seibel: Not realizing that his own previous code would've probably fallen afoul of the same standards?
Cosell: No. He got that. He was a convert. It's sort of like the guys who give up smoking and are the most pains in the butt about other people still smoking. He became one of the strongest guys on my project. He used to nag me when I wasn't careful enough—when I compromised. My project was the first project of its type he had ever worked on. Communications, real time, all this stuff—all new to him. But he was a smart guy and he went through this little epiphany and came out of it the programmer I always thought he was going to be. Last I heard, he was doing wonderfully. With him it worked out. Other people didn't like working with me because they found me too overbearing; I can't imagine why.
I don't know why I had those two convictions. I arrived at BBN with no skill per se, but I had those principles in the back of my head for some reason. I thought I ought to be able to understand anything and it shouldn't be so hard. I found that even for the time-sharing system and the IMPs—for all of those class of programs, that proved to be true. In general once I had the right understanding of what a program was supposed to do, the pieces would fall into place. The pieces that didn't belong would stand out like a miscolored piece in a jigsaw puzzle.
Another principle was I always wanted clean listings. I wanted the thing to be just right. When you have to fix a bug in a program you never, ever fix the bug in the place where you find it. My rule is, “If you knew then what you know now about the fact that this piece of code is broken, how would you have organized this piece of the routine?” What were you thinking about wrong before? Fix the code so that can't happen. When you finish with a routine I want every routine you work on to look as if it was just written. I do not want to see any evidence of afterthoughts or things gone wrong followed by something to correct the error or a mysterious piece of code saying, “This routine returns the wrong value every now and then so I've got to fix it.” I don't want to see any of that. I want to see code that looks like through some divine inspiration you got it exactly right the first time.
The problem is that coding isn't fun if all you can do is call things out of a library, if you can't write the library yourself. If the job of coding is just to be finding the right combination of parameters, that does fairly obvious things, then who'd want to go into that as a career?
There's this overemphasis on reusable software where you never get to open up the box and see what's inside the box. It's nice to have these black boxes but, almost always, if you can look inside the box you can improve it and make it work better once you know what's inside the box. Instead people make these closed wrappers around everything and present the closure to the programmers of the world, and the programmers of the world aren't allowed to diddle with that. All they're able to do is assemble the parts. And so you remember that when you call this subroutine you put x0, y0, x1, y1 but when you call this subroutine it's x0, x1, y0, y1. You get that right, and that's your job.
or like using copilot lol
By class I understand a historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasize that it is a historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a ‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.
More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure. The finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context. Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes, each with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each other. We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way.
The question, of course, is how the individual got to be in this ‘social rôle’, and how the particular social organization (with its property-rights and structure of authority) got to be there. And these are historical questions. If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But if we watch these men over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their institutions. Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.
Our only criterion of judgement should not be whether or not a man’s actions are justified in the light of subsequent evolution. After all, we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves. In some of the lost causes of the people of the Industrial Revolution we may discover insights into social evils which we have yet to cure. Moreover, the greater part of the world today is still undergoing problems of industrialization, and of the formation of democratic institutions, analogous in many ways to our own experience during the Industrial Revolution. Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won.
[...] So long as Satan remained undefined and of no fixed class abode, Methodism condemned working people to a kind of moral civil war – between the chapel and the pub, the wicked and the redeemed, the lost and the saved. [...]
i just like this
[...] In eighteenth-century Britain riotous actions assumed two different forms: that of more or less spontaneous popular direct action; and that of the deliberate use of the crowd as an instrument of pressure, by persons ‘above’ or apart from the crowd. The first form has not received the attention which it merits. It rested upon more articulate popular sanctions and was validated by more sophisticated traditions than the word ‘riot’ suggests. The most common example is the bread or food riot, repeated cases of which can be found in almost every town and county until the 1840s. This was rarely a mere uproar which culminated in the breaking open of barns or the looting of shops. It was legitimized by the assumptions of an older moral economy, which taught the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by profiteering upon the necessities of the people.
People…. What labour do you perform in the society?
Privileged Class. None: we are not made to labour.
People. How then have you acquired your wealth?
Privileged Class. By taking the pains to govern you.
People. To govern us!… We toil, and you enjoy; we produce and you dissipate; wealth flows from us, and you absorb it. Privileged men, class distinct from the people, form a nation apart and govern yourselves.
from Volney's Ruins of Empire. lol
This has too much of hindsight about it: ‘cheap and simple government’ is a phrase from Place’s later Benthamite jargon, whereas the society in 1795 wanted an end to repression, and manhood suffrage, on grounds of liberty and equity. But Place is probably accurate in saying that, as early as 1795, he saw the rôle of the working-class reformers as accessories to middle-class or aristocratic reformers in Parliament. Working men could not hope to bring about reform by and for themselves, but should give support to others ‘most likely’ to win concessions. This was in one sense a far-seeing tactical compromise; but it entailed attending on a crisis – awaiting, perhaps, financial dislocation, food riots and tumults among the populace – rather than a policy of hastening the crisis by popular agitation. It is the policy of those self-respecting tradesmen or artisans who preferred to build bridges towards the middle class than to try and bridge the gulf between themselves and the tumultuous poor. As such, it represents a withdrawal from the agitation among ‘members unlimited’, while at the same time embodying the strengths of self-education and painstaking organization.