I know it’s a German publication, but this is perhaps a symptom of the monoculture that permeates a lot of organizations in the “West”
> Following Dr. Knuth’s doctrine helps to ward off moronry. He is known for introducing the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance of writing code that is readable by humans as well as computers — a notion that nowadays seems almost twee.
Calling the idea that code should be readable by humans "almost twee" just makes me think that the writer has no idea what they're talking about. Sure, there are times when people write crap code, but being readable by humans is the whole reason why we built coding languages. Not to mention, the average readability of code has probably increased over time, not decreased. The author is basically just pulling this statement out of her behind to embellish Knuth's reputation, to the detriment of the credibility of the rest of the article.
It's nowhere near the magnitude of the fabrications in Der Spiegel of course, but it does seem to be the case that writers are willing to trust their own prejudices without fact checking. I was able to spot when those prejudices in the above example but only because I have relevant domain knowledge. It makes me wonder, how many times do I swallow the BS without knowing it? It's just a matter of how small (or big) of a statement they're willing to make without verifying it's veracity.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/donald-knuth-comp...
I think people who study the arts are less likely to have experience with and understand complex systems and, because of the different structure of knowlege in a subject like journalism, it's easier to be overconfident in one's knowlege. Especially when extended to topics like physics which require mathematics to truly understand.
This is a strange criticism, and ironically it seems to reveal your own misconception of what "literate programming" actually is. Setting aside the discussion of how languages and design philosophies make tradeoffs that affect readability, Knuth's particular brand of "literate programming" pushes a concept that is orthogonal to language design, and substantially different than the precepts of style and commenting practices offered by things like PEP8. "Literate Programming". From Knuth's homepage [0]:
> The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer.
From the literateprogramming.com page that Knuth's homepage links to, an excerpt from Ross Williams:
> Instead of writing code containing documentation, the literate programmer writes documentation containing code. No longer does the English commentary injected into a program have to be hidden in comment delimiters at the top of the file, or under procedure headings, or at the end of lines. Instead, it is wrenched into the daylight and made the main focus.
Here's a HN thread about docco, one of the few real-world tools related to literate programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2089912
"Literate programming" is not just about readable code, it's about fundamentally restructuring the entire program to be read as one would read a work of literature. And this is something that is not at all standard practice, nor a philosophy that everyone agrees to even be ideal in theory. Here's Peter Norvig's criticism [2]:
> I think the problem with Literate Programming is that assumes there is a single best order of presentation of the explanation. I agree that the order imposed by the compiler is not always best, but different readers have different purposes. You don’t read documentation like a novel, cover to cover. You read the parts that you need for the task(s) you want to do now. What would be ideal is a tool to help construct such paths for each reader, just-in-time; not a tool that makes the author choose a single pth for all readers.
So saying Knuth's philosophy of "literate programming" is "twee" is not at all inaccurate. The sentence structure from the NYT article could be rejiggered so that it's clearer that "twee" refers to Knuth's philosophy, and not "code that is readable by humans" in general. But the author is absolutely right to describe Knuth as being a pioneer in literate programming, and that it's a paradigm not followed in practice by mainstream software development.
[0] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html
[1] http://www.literateprogramming.com/
[2] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2016/07/06/literate-programmi...
> He is known for introducing the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance of writing code that is readable by humans as well as computers — a notion that nowadays seems almost twee. Dr. Knuth has gone so far as to argue that some computer programs are, like Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral,” works of literature worthy of a Pulitzer.
Note this part specifically:
> the notion of “literate programming,” emphasizing the importance...a notion that nowadays seems almost twee"
"literate programming" is the notion emphasizing* the "importance" of writing code readable by humans. And this "notion" The word "which" would make it even clearer that the subject of the clause is "literate programming", but the sentence is still grammatically correct as is. Everyone thinks it's important for code to be readable, but Knuth is the one who is radical about how important it is -- to the point that he thinks programs should be "literature worthy of a Pulitzer".
In any case, the NYT author is more accurate than the previous HN commenter, who seems to have jumped to a conclusion without knowing anything about the concept "literate programming", or how and why Knuth is known for it. The NYT author is not "basically just pulling this statement out of her behind to embellish Knuth's reputation", but it seems the commenter is not as familiar with Knuth and/or computer programming as he thinks he is.
Actually..
no.
He did do this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
And it's not just that programming should be in languages rather than machine code, but that the code + comments should read like a coherent document.
In other words, just because you write in a programming language doesn't mean it's literate programming.
Ultimately the reason why he did it is because he could and I blame the nonexistent fact checking at Spiegel for this. But on a more personal level Relotius said he couldn’t stand the pressure of not delivering a great story (he won multiple awards first). I would also blame these awards for beeing to trusting, somebody like him should never have reached this level of fame and reputation.
I never really read his stuff, but I remember reading one story a long time ago that had someone start singing a song and I remembered wondering if this really happended or if I am in the realm of phantasy there. Now I know.
The problem is incentives, always
As a German living in Hamburg, where three of the main German publications (Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Der Stern) are produced (and Die Bild as well as Die Welt were also until recently), having worked with as well as being friends with a lot of people working there, I can assure you: it's not just incentives for the author, but also incentives for other people in the news organization(s) at work here.
The author's completely made up stories about, e.g. ...
- an American women who is traveling the whole country voluntarily, so that the quorum of one person being present at an execution for it to happen is met
- an innocent Syrian boy who thinks he caused the civil war
- an American town at the Mexican border, that is openly racist and full of dumb backwater, redneck folk
... feed into a commonly shared narrative. Those kind of elegantly written stories serve to immortalize these world-views held by many working at those companies.
Veterans of Der Spiegel were quick to point out, that in their days of working there, it would have been impossible to get even one of his reports pass the inhouse fact checkers and attribute this current blindsightedness to the rise of constructivism amongst journalists.
In what sense do you use constructivism here? I assume it's not mathematical constructivism.
Two examples:
1) As avid reader of American news, I'm always amazed by their one-sidedness when they report about "success"-stories of the German renewable energies program ("Now This" has multiple videos that if translated to German would come across as a teenager's propaganda attempt). But since their audience is American, usually not fluent in German, it's a cakewalk to "construct the truth" by not write a single sentence about domestic German criticisms of those programs.
2) The right-wing example in Germany would be reporting about violent and raping refugees, without stating that most of the victims are refugees themself and that it is often refugees who help with the investigations etc.
“Now This” has nothing that doesn't come across as a teenager's propaganda attempt (or, perhaps more to the point, rehashing press releases from interested parties) in English, so I'm not to surprised you think it would come off that way translated to German.
Then again, if you asked Americans to name a respected news source, “Now This” wouldn't be a frequent response.
„Now this“ is of course an exaggeration of journalistic constructionism, there are more professional approaches.
Constructivism is, in any of its manifestations, never a normative theory. Rather, it tries to describe how reality or certain concepts come about. Instead of saying that we should discard all notions of truth and try to construct reality/some concept in a certain way, it is a simple acknowledgement that our perception is socially mediated.It, of course, doesn't deny that there are two mushroom heads on the ground but rather it highlights that we view (i.e. construct) them as two mushrooms even though they are part of the same organism
Are you sure about this?
There are editors in such publications, and editors have bias.
which is not to say you aren't right, but assuming this reason omits a whole can of far more unpleasant worms
That’s the part that annoys me most. You want bigoted hick towns? As of twenty years ago, I could have rattled off a half-dozen towns in Indiana that would have qualified (though the author’s pre-conceived image would have been a stretch for even these towns). I can’t believe that in twenty years they’ve all turned into liberal enclaves. But that would have taken more work and research, so pick an innocent town on the map and write your narrative about them instead? And if all places, Minnesota? Of all of small town America, I picture MN as probably most “liberal”, for lack of a better description, though I admit little data.
I dunno, in the end I’m annoyed that the reporter didn’t even do a very good job of faking it, and a small town of what are probably nice folks (“damned good folks”?) took the hit.
A quick example of this in action. A friend of mine is irrationally partisan when it comes to being a Democrat. The party can do no wrong; all wrongs are ignored, without exception. Hillary Clinton was her unicorn politician that was to change everything bad about the world, she cried for weeks about the election loss. Then she moved on to attacking any of her friends she suspected of supporting Trump. When that wasn't enough to sate the anger and hurt, she moved on to demanding proof of loyalty - proof that you didn't support Trump and did support Hillary (Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein supporters were also evil).
She loves any documentary or media she can get her hands on about lesser educated / poor white people in America (she is a white person, and grew up in poor Appalachia). She loves to make fun of them; these are people she hates. It confirms her existing bias and makes everything feel better by reinforcing what she believes about politics generally and the 2016 election specifically. It gives her a villain group to blame any negative situation on (identity politics practically requires groups to designate as evil or bad, to properly establish the framework).
/s
believe me, the liberals and progressives I work with in the tech industry are just as bigoted if not worse than anyone I met growing up in the midwest. They outright dehumanize the "other" ie conservatives with complete blindness to the hypocrisy.
Trump is openly supportive of LGBTQIA+++ people, was the first Republican presidential nominee to be, and was supportive of them long before Hillary and Obama were.
Healthcare does not automatically equate to socialized healthcare, and it is ignorant and arrogant to make a blanket characterization that voting for a Republican is a vote against "healthcare", whatever that's supposed to mean.
Trump supporters were assaulted, that much is factual. The notion that they were a) liberal b) activists, is not a notion you can support with facts.
progressive university professor and black lives matter activist cracked a trump supporters skull with a bike lock
Of course since our court system is a joke filled with activist judges he gets 3 year probation for what should be attempted murder
If you flip the situation it's a hate crime covered daily by the mainstream media
Did you get everything off of your chest yet? Did you or your alternate account have any other grievances that you wanted list?