Zaval, others and me

[bloodline]

I know I’m new here so lack any real insight as to political issues that have arisen, but I do want to say I’ve really appreciated all who have helped me, everyone has been extremely patient and knowledgeable.

[bzt]

The problem here is who gets to define what is right. What if someone else's right doesn't match what you think is right? Then what?

That's pretty simple actually. We are lucky that OSDev is a science where objective answers exists. I mean, the only question is, "is there a program that can do this or that?" If you can prove something with a PoC, then others shouldn't question that. I believe the problem starts when people don't believe in facts and don't believe their own eyes seeing a proof. But this is a result of this propaganda-heavy fake-news age that undermines people's trust in reality, and the root cause leads much further than this forum. I think the best we can do here is to accept the scientific method. It might hurt some members, but still that's the best tool humankind has ever invented to be objective.

I know I'm a very strong advocate to science, but in part that's because I'm surrounded by brainwashed criminal cultists, trying to convince me that we only exists because some alien jerked off into a vulkan, and you must f*ck children to keep your mental health (yes, they are THAT bad). The only way to keep your sanity and humanity amongst them is to question everything people say. As Euclid put: "Never believe anything just because somebody said so." This could lead to confrontation with people who don't understand the importance of the scientific method, and I'm sorry if someone felt offended by me forcing this. I most honestly apologize to them for that, but I don't feel sorry about me trusting in science.

Cheers,
bzt

[kzinti]

That's pretty simple actually. We are lucky that OSDev is a science where objective answers exists. I mean, the only question is, "is there a program that can do this or that?" If you can prove something with a PoC, then others shouldn't question that.

I agree that computers are deterministic and that you can prove whether or not a piece of code or program is correct. But I don't agree the activity of programming and software design in particular has these characteristics.

Design is always about tradeoffs and decisions will be influenced by your believes / values / priorities at any time. If this wasn't the case, there wouldn't be a need for design and we would just implement the "correct" solution.

Computer programming is as much an art as a science. Reasonable people will not get into arguments about how many bits fit in a structure or the runtime complexity of a piece of code. But given the same information and facts, they might come to a different conclusion and structure their code / design differently.

More food for thoughts:

Tabs vs spaces? Which is right?
K&R vs Allman? Which is right?
...

[crosssans]

Computer programming is as much an art as a science. Reasonable people will not get into arguments about how many bits fit in a structure or the runtime complexity of a piece of code. But given the same information and facts, they might come to a different conclusion and structure their code / design differently.

This is probably the best sentence about programming theory that I've read since I actually started programming! If only most people on this forum understood this, many topics wouldn't have deviated from a simple question to a stormy political debate that does not really help anyway :[

[zaval]

To wit, zaval has yet to even write anything himself. if I were him, I wouldn't.

First, I wanted to joke, but then realized: jokes only will add to the already significant amount of snivel over here; worse yet, there might the need in Pampers arise and that's problematic in quarantine days, so yeah - your suggestion looks better.