at Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers tonight:

[just the one page, as I’m given it to work on]

…spoke of prin­ci­ples as old as his toi­let. He was read­ing, too, a loyal paper, loyal, at least, in those days,—the Jour­nal des Debats. Bow­ing, as we passed, he con­signed us, with a grace­ful wave of the hand, to the care of Pierre, the frot­teur. I took him for some frag­ment of a duc et pair of the old school; but, on putting the ques­tion to the frot­teur, who him­self might have passed for a fig­u­rante at the opera, he informed us that he was ‘Notre bour­geois,’ the mas­ter of the hotel.” It is quite won­der­ful to us how Miladi could have sur­vived to relate so shock­ing a meta­mor­pho­sis. Ovid has noth­ing half so strange and heart-​​rending.

The instances we have men­tioned are far from being the only ones in which her Lady­ship was “put out of sorts” by the Anglo­ma­nia, which, she would make us believe, is oper­at­ing at present as great a rev­o­lu­tion in the social, as was effected in ’98 in the polit­i­cal con­di­tion of France. All along the road from Calais to Paris, she sees noth­ing but “youths gal­lop­ing their horses in the cav­alry cos­tume of Hyde Park,” “smart gigs and natty den­nets,” “cot­tages of gen­til­ity, with white walls and green shut­ters, and neat offices, rivalling the diver­si­fied orders of the Wyatvilles of Isling­ton and High­gate,” in short, noth­ing but “Eng­lish neat­ness and pro­pri­ety on every side,” with one ter­ri­ble excep­tion, how­ever, “an Irish jaunt­ing car!” of which she chanced, to her infi­nite dis­may, to catch a glimpse. The sec­ond appear­ance that she makes in the streets of Paris, is for the pur­pose of buy­ing some “bon­bons, dia­blotins en papil­lotes, Pastilles de Nantes, and other sug­ared pret­ti­nesses,” for which Parisian con­fec­tion­ers are so renowned. Accord­ingly, she goes into a shop where she sup­poses that “fan­ci­ful ide­al­i­ties, sweet noth­ings, can­died epics and eclogues in spun sugar, so light, and so per­fumed as to resem­ble (was there ever such non­sense) con­gealed odours, or a crys­tal­liza­tion of the essence of sweet flow­ers,” are to be sold, but on inquiry she is told by a “demoi­selle behind the counter, as neat as Eng­lish muslin and French (what a won­der it wasn’t Eng­lish) tour­nure could make her,” that ‘we sell no such a ting,’ but that she might have ‘de cracker, be bun, de plom-​​cake, de spice gin­ger­bread, de mut­ton and de mince pye, de crompet and de muf­fin, de gelée of de calves foot, and de apple dumplin.’ Reader, Lady Mor­gan “was struck dumb!” She pur­chased a bun­dle of crack­ers, “hard enough to crack the teeth of an ele­phant,” and hur­ried from the shop. But mis­for­tunes never come sin­gle, and her lady­ship, though an excep­tion to most other gen­eral rules, was not des­tined to prove the cor­rect­ness of that one in this instance, for just as she was escap­ing from the place where she had expe­ri­enced the seri­ous incon­ve­nience of being “struck dumb,” she was struck in another way—viz. on the left cheek, by the explosion…

So I brought up my pre­vi­ous com­ments just now, in class. Specif­i­cally the point that there is no valid sit­u­a­tion in which one should pro­gram, ab ini­tio, under pres­sure. Response, from the class as well as the instructor?

“Well, you’re asked to do math­e­mat­ics under pres­sure in all the other class! Why shouldn’t we write soft­ware that way too? It’s only fair.”

Because soft­ware, as it hap­pens, is an arti­fact, cre­ated by the appli­ca­tion of skills. Math­e­mat­ics, at least as it is tested on exams, is the exe­cu­tion of an algo­rithm.

Tell me how those are not different?

“It’s only wafffferrrr-​​thin…”

Head­line: AFP sci­ence writer grasps inef­fec­tu­ally at rhetor­i­cal straws.

This image cap­tured by NASA’s Earth-​​orbiting Hub­ble Space Tele­scope shows Mars when it was approx­i­mately 43 mil­lion miles (68 mil­lion km) from Earth. On Sun­day, Octo­ber 30, the Red Planet will be 69.4 mil­lion kilo­me­ters (43.1 mil­lion miles) from Earth — a dis­tance that in galac­tic terms is less than wafer-​​thin and will not be equalled until 2018.

‘Tis mid-​​autumn, when a young person’s heart turns to thoughts of… well, midterms and papers and such­like crap, appar­ently. The grad­ing thereof (as many of the peo­ple to whom I link are writ­ing now)… and also the tak­ing thereof.

I recall Alex Mal­let had a hard time a while back with a midterm. Mine yes­ter­day… an utterly dif­fer­ent experience.

[Type type type. Redact redact redact.]

I have never ever been put in a sit­u­a­tion where I want to make an appoint­ment to meet with the instruc­tor, sit down, and start off, “I have to tell you that I’m very con­cerned about your per­for­mance in this class.…”

But I am. Really. This is a pro­vi­sional class, taught by a young tenure-​​track fac­ulty mem­ber. We are so far off the play­ing card here… [well, looks like I’m going to redact that one too].

The worst I can get is a bad grade, some amus­ing anec­dotes, and a half-​​dozen use­ful neg­a­tive exam­ples I can use next time I’m train­ing instructors.

I really, really like this guy. And so, at this eleventh hour, I hereby com­mit to do my best to help. I will be happy to set aside what­ever time it takes to work with him to rewrite the syl­labus so it can get back on topic, intro­duce some kind of the­sis to the mate­r­ial he’s try­ing to present, really bring those ped­a­gogic points home with some killer exam­ples, and gen­er­ally squash and elim­i­nate the reams of obfus­ca­tory chaff that’s crept in.

Cause I sat in that exam think­ing, What in God’s name is this test­ing?! Writ­ing untested, slap­dash, hur­ried code under pres­sure? With no the­ory, no rea­son, no back­ground, no point? Syn­tax and object models?!

There. Now I’m in a state. I will unredact a lit­tle bit:

There is no excus­able sit­u­a­tion in which you should be writ­ing code as if it were writ­ten for an exam. None. I would fire the HR per­son who con­sid­ered using an exam like this, even when try­ing to place some­body for the mean­est lit­tle code mon­key job. The whole point of pro­fes­sional soft­ware devel­op­ment is to make it so that set of con­di­tions never, ever arises: As a devel­oper you should be unhur­ried, thought­ful, cun­ning, delighted, engaged, well-​​armed, always writ­ing tests, always col­lab­o­rat­ing, and inces­santly talk­ing with your cus­tomer about their needs.

Every step away from those is a sin, because it takes value away from your cus­tomer. So, in a nut­shell: we were just tested on our abil­ity to sin. Along many axes at once.

Worse, some of my class­mates will end up being man­agers. They will have had one expe­ri­ence writ­ing code, and if this is all they’ve seen I’m wor­ried they’ll come to expect the same per­for­mance and behav­ior from their own devel­op­ment teams. At best they’ll think, “Oh, I already know how to run Excel.”

They are being trained to become the Pointy-​​Haired Bosses of tomorrow.

The going rate at the Com­mu­nity Col­lege for what we’ve going to do—in the whole semester-​​long class as it is play­ing out now—is about $372. Plus gas money.