Comment by sph
1 year ago
> The website reads like an edgy script-kiddy blog.
The code does, as well. Either Mr. Whitney's brain is not wired like a regular homo sapiens sapiens, or the entire thing smells of "I am smarted than you and I don't need to lower myself to your level."
I do not buy for a single second that for Mr. Whitney debugging IOCCC-level obfuscated code is easier than plain C code. One writes "normal code" because one will have to read it later, and they don't want to spend ages doing so, unless they have to keep an air of superiority about their abilities to their peers.
I get that APL is obtuse and dense. But writing obtuse and dense C doesn't turn it into APL.
I worked with a guy who could handle loops nested half a dozen deep with data dependencies woven through the structure with exactly the same apparent cognitive overhead as for i = 0, N. The sort of structure you get when you arrange a difficult calculation to match the cache hierarchy of the target machine. Didn't do comments or variable names with much enthusiasm.
He was superb at finding errors at code review. As in looking through code someone else had written and pulling out the mistakes. Presumably everything looked completely trivial to him, regardless of how tangled the control flow had got.
Whitney may be similar.
What if he is smarter than you and doesn’t need to lower himself to your level.