Posts by Heather Gaye
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1) No one was ever moved to weep by a line of code.
*coff* Just because you can't comprehend it, doesn't mean it's never happened. There are a couple of open-source modules that have moved me to tears. Granted, that's after wading through a whole lot of truly abysmal legacy code at my work.
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It's not completely unheard of, but not very common.
Hmm...by that I meant as a percentage of the full body of code that exists; but compared to, say, music it's probably about the same percentage of pure creativity to derivation. So I think I'm going to have to rethink my opinion.
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But every now and then, a programmer gets to formulate a new problem and solve it, all by themselves. Or they get to solve an old problem in a startlingly creative new way.
Absolutely.
.. although in the first instance it's the formulation of the problem that's the creative aspect, and strictly speaking it's not a programmer that does that - in the sense that the role the person has taken is entrepreneur rather than programmer (that comment may be coloured by mild frustration at being in a job in which I must write what they tell me to, *coff* no matter how awful the specs are).
In the second instance, yes, programming creativity - the development of a solution whose structure has no precedent. It's not completely unheard of, but not very common. And I don't reckon there are that many codemonkeys that even want to be artists. Art appreciators, perhaps, they'll read the books & blogs of the top IT creators, but to use the tools & methods that the creators have made, rather than creating themselves (& that comment may be coloured by mild frustration at being in a workplace where there are no better programmers to keep me on my toes).
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Coding is still creating. It's sticking existing elements together to make something new, just like writing or music.
I hear this quite a bit, usually from non-coders, and much as I appreciate the encouragement, it's not strictly true. Elegant code is a beautiful thing for sure, but coding is inventing, not creating. Code is devised because there was a problem that needed to be solved. Creation is different - a creator's ultimate goal is to come up with a new idea from nothing. While a programmer could potentially create code as art, most coding isn't creative.
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Yeah, bummer about Aurora - I just wish they could have engineered it without having Van's character go from A Bit Thick to Delusional Paranoid Lunatic in the space of ten minutes.
Actually, I think it was pretty well in keeping; the only thing that surprised me was that they crammed the whole saga into a single episode (which leads me to agree with Craig's conclusion that the fall of Van West is nowhere near done).
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But a correlation it remains no matter how strong. There's a stronger correlation between the sex of those doing most of the teacher bashing and the sex of their father.
Well, fair do's, I can't prove anything, but I think a strong correlation would still be sufficient argument against corporal punishment. If the worst kids are already being hit at home, then I imagine that hitting them at school would likely prove just as effective.
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(speechless)
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The removal of corporal punishment in schools has been highlighted as a root cause of the rise in violence against teachers
This morning I also heard it was because of teh drugs and violent video games. OH COME ON PEOPLE! Whatever happened to violence begets violence? I thought that was still self-evident. Line up all those kids that have hit their teachers, then go check what kind of extra-curricular bashing they get. I bet there's a pretty strong correlation.
At risk of wandering off on a (possibly apocryphal) tangent, I think family first are just exploiting a very narrow example of a wider issue; their idea being that if a teacher gets attacked by a pupil, the teacher can't retaliate in defense. I've heard there's a lot of regulation in place to protect students, to the extent that the scrutiny placed on male primary school teachers especially is driving them out of the field (disclaimer: anecdotal evidence only). I don't doubt that it's important to have such regulations, but I imagine that an unfortunate side-effect is that it aggravates those situations where a teacher's authority is already tenuous (either because the teacher isn't very good, or one or more students are completely unmanageable). Teachers feel less in control, smacking someone starts looking like a nice idea.
So, I think there's a valid issue: empowering teachers that have problems exercising authority, without eroding the safety of students. Family first has conveniently rewritten it into a false dilemma: EITHER you support re-introduction of corporal punishment OR you support violence against defenceless teachers. Ingenius lunacy!
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a few episodes of Sports Night which I liked just because it had Robert Guillaume in it - so maybe that would explain why I don't find it wearing.
Certainly, Studio 60 has nothing on Sports Night for bludgeoning their viewers with "the issues".
AltTV's UHF broadcast ceased about 3 days ago.
They still exist, but apparently they couldn't afford both the Auckland free-to-air frequency and the Sky slot. They've opted for Sky.
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Weird, I'm loving Studio 60! 30 Rock..not so much.