Then what about the author's other points where you can increase your productivity if you avoid all alcohol and get good rest. If productivity is what is most important, then maybe your employer should be allowed to limit your alcohol consumption during your off-hours.
If you're employing someone putting together sprockets on an assembly line, then yes, productivity may be the most important thing to you. If you are employing managers, designers, programmers, advertising folks... then maybe productivity is not your primary goal. Maybe getting the smartest work from them is more important than getting the greatest amount of output.
Personally, I'd rather have one brilliant, game-changing program/algorithm/policy/advertisement than one hundred mediocre pieces of output.
He decries the lack of respect given to developers of creative works, yet here he steals ideas from another creative group and uses it without any attribution whatsoever.
I'd say it detracts from the strength of his argument just a bit.
(Note: hopefully he fixes this in the future, but no attribution as of Oct 14, 2012 10:51am)
Maybe because scary things crawl out of dark holes? Because you can drop things into holes & not get them out? Because you can hurt your little finger putting it into holes where it doesn't belong? How about Flash Gordon's Trial by Treebeast?
You certainly know your market better than I do, but it seems to me that you are taking advantage of a viral effect. As people use Jira (for instance) and they move around from one company to another, they're likely to recommend using Jira at their new places when they get sick of Rational, Remedy, Bugzilla, etc.
People using Jira and realizing that there is a bug tracker that doesn't stink are very likely to bring that message to their next company. The word about a great product spreads... like a virus, albeit a slower moving one than pet rocks.
There doesn't seem to be anything specific to a "Perl Shop" on the list.
Perl specific maturity items would be:
1) Do all packages have documentation (pod) stored in the package file(s), and is it up to date?
2) Are there tests built using TAP (e.g. Test::More), and is this built into some kind of continuous build/test server?
3) Have a set of perlcritic rules been set up for the shop? Are these checked as part of code-review or scm check-in?
4) Is there a consistent set of rules for how external packages are brought into the current build? How are local changes to CPAN-originated packages handled?
These are the kinds of policies I'd expect to see implemented in a mature Perl Shop. The policies listed in the original post are those which I'd expect to see implemented in a mature software firm.
These ideas are named to honor the person who did much of the grunt work to get them proven/accepted, but we continue to use the name as a convenience.
If you're working with educated people, it's a lot easier to say, "apply DeMorgan," than to say, "why don't you negate the clause, remembering to negate each of the internal clauses, and switching the and's to or's and vice versa."
There exist people who use the names to sound intellectual, and these people are annoying, but just because some people enjoy spouting (in the general public) "obscure" rules and names, that doesn't mean that using such names is without value.
You said: Actually it does [mean he's wrong] because it is upon that logical fallacy that the counter argument is entirely built upon
Wrong is the wrong word :)
What you're looking for is "invalid". An argument is valid if and only if the conclusion follows from the premises. In other words, if the premises are true then it cannot be the case that the conclusion is false. Since a logical fallacy adds nothing to an argument, the conclusion does not follow from the premise. Since the conclusion can therefore be false, even if the logical fallacy is true, the argument is labeled invalid.
Just for completeness... A more strict standard is soundness. An argument is sound if and only if the argument is valid and the premises are true. If an argument is sound, then the conclusion is necessarily true. Obviously, the argument invoking a logical fallacy as its premise is unsound because it is invalid.
It is also perfectly possible for the conclusion to be true even though the argument itself is invalid and unsound.
If you still would like to apply the label "wrong" to it, then I'd say, "The argument is wrong, even though your conclusion happens to be true."
(Note: I can't see the post that started all of this off as it has been deleted, so I'm not making any comment on the truthiness of his/her conclusion)
If you are able to make this happen, it would be very interesting if you could get the visitors to write a short note before entering about what they expect, how well they think they'll handle the disorientation, etc. After they're done have them write a similar note about their experience and how reality matched up with their expectations.
For all of us that don't have access to such facilities, this kind of before/after diary might be very interesting.
A great article, and you must be commended on your dedication.
That said, it reads almost exactly like the opening to "American Psycho". Sure, Bateman's routine is slightly different than yours, but both narratives have the same affect.
Best of luck, and I can't wait for your article on business cards!
I cannot believe you missed the most important reason: you shared some of your life with your daughter.
My dad was a programmer, and I was always hacking away on the computers that we had around the house (sure... it was an Atari 800.... but you'd be amazed at what you can do on that little thing). Unfortunately, he never worked with me on any of my code ever. He never taught me anything about design, about computer languages, --nothing--. Perhaps I could have been more aggressive about getting him to help me, but I was an introvert's introvert. I was the kid in school who blushed when his name was called during attendance.
Looking back, I can't believe the wasted opportunity. You should enjoy this activity with your daughter for what it is. Forget the other 1,000 paragraphs you wrote about why.
I'm glad that you did this, and your daughter will be too.
( I read your article twice to make sure I didn't miss it, but I sometimes skip a sentence, so please pardon me if I got this wrong. )
These question marks are almost as annoying as the "self-interview" question marks made popular by former Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld.
What is a self-interview? Well, it's when you ask yourself a question then immediately answer it. Are they occurring more now than before? Listening to people on TV news shows and NPR seems to show that more are doing it now.
Why would people do this? Because it makes it sound as if they're answering a question that has been asked -- even if the answer they're giving wasn't actually in response to the actual interviewer.
I clicked on your CV just because the link was available on the side, and I was shocked to find out that you're still in high school. There are professionals that would have taken 10x as long to explain it only half as clearly. For context, I've been in the business for ~25 years. Keep up the great work.
Very nice article, but I did not like the example data he was using.
The problem is that both population and tournament city could be dependent on year.
Population (obviously) changes from year-to-year, so either his original data is incorrect or he's recording a city's latest population along with all historic tennis championship winners -- neither interpretation makes a lot of sense. Why not use something unlikely to change such as either elevation or country?
Likewise, tournament city is not a fixed value for a tournament. For example, the Australian Open, which he uses as one of his examples, has also been set in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth, Christchurch (NZ), and Hastings (NZ).
To resolve this, he would either have to introduce a two column primary key (tournament, year), or pick some simpler data. I suggest the latter.
Even with all of this criticism, I think it's one of the cleanest introductions of the normal forms for beginners.
Welcome to ABC, Inc. In these two cubicles we have our vetting department. One screener always tells the truth, while the other always tells a lie. If you could only ask one question... oh never mind.
What would be annoying? The comments with the highest votes would still be at the top. He/she said nothing about randomizing the comments. The only effect of the idea would be to eliminate "celebrity" votes.
Management is orthogonal to code design/dev/maint.
No one (ok... almost no one) has no management nor coding skill, rather each of us has a mix of the two. The great organizations I've worked in had extremely smart people in management and in development, but the type of brilliance was different.
From the article, the problem with the leaders was in how they handled the management of the team and the publicity of the announcement. You know there are problems when many of the collaborators asked to be left off of the paper; insufficient experimental checks were done (according to some team members); some of the team members heard about the results from the press release rather than from their colleagues; and so on.
The team also did not ask them to step down. The internal vote of 16-13 was insufficient to have them removed (2/3 majority required). So they really did step down on their own.
If you're employing someone putting together sprockets on an assembly line, then yes, productivity may be the most important thing to you. If you are employing managers, designers, programmers, advertising folks... then maybe productivity is not your primary goal. Maybe getting the smartest work from them is more important than getting the greatest amount of output.
Personally, I'd rather have one brilliant, game-changing program/algorithm/policy/advertisement than one hundred mediocre pieces of output.