C Community's Cavalier Attitude On Software Reliability

[Guy Greenwald]

In article <19955 at dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>, rrr at eleazar.dartmouth.edu (Robin R. Reynolds) writes [of Bill Wolfe]:

| Dogmatism gets no one anywhere.
| 
| Prognosis: Not Good.
| Recommended Treatment: Ignore this guy.  He basks in your attention.

It's hard to ignore him. Those who have followed postings to
misc.jobs.misc recognize Mr Wolfe as the person who frightened a lot
of job seekers into thinking they would never get hired because they
lacked a Master's Degree. In my opinion, it was a cruel performance.
The attack here is not on insecurity but on pride. Regardless of the
intellectual tone of the discussion, the tactic is identical: provoke
a number of people, get a lot of attention, argue relentlessly, shift
ground, ignore inconvenient rebuttals and send electronic hate mail
to alarm or anger opponents. We're not dealing with a nice person here,
nor a reasonable one, despite the veneer of intellectuality. The
discussion he provokes can be useful, however, as long as one
realizes that one will never convince Mr Wolfe. That's not what he's
about.

The issues of software reliability, the merits of one language vs.
another, how to document problems and when a product should be released
are important. They are worth discussing. A discussion of them can
be carried on with a sense of humor and moderation even if one of the
participants is humorless and extreme.

--G. Guy Greenwald II