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The Best of Verity Stob
Stob's writing is hard to categorize. It's both humor and satire, sometimes just overwhelmingly funny and sometimes barely causing a chuckle. It's British, so some things passed way over my head. Since she started her writing back in 1998, there are references to mainframes, Unisys systems and the days when you would call tech support and instantly get a human being on the other end. Nevertheless, the book is entertaining, although it's more of a coffee table book, where you can pick it up and start on any page, than book where you'd go chapter-by-chapter.
Her humor is original and versatile. Poems, stories, scripts, hacked diaries, parodies -- the book has them all: after all, it's a collection of the best of her writing. She's an experienced C++ programmer who had been in the Windows world for a while, so frequently the jokes relate to C++ peculiarities. Such as Thirteen ways to loathe VB (written in 2000):
Calling functions and accessing arrays. In most languages you can distinguish between a call to function F with parameter 3 an a reference to an array F with index 3, because one is written F(3) and the other F[3]. In Visual Basic they're both written F(3). Yes.
Her 2001 article for DDJ is actually nothing but a screenshot of a page called Dotdotdot with the subtitle Where nerds go on and on and on and... followed by a paragraph-long article titled Microsoft does something and a bunch of upset comments from the readers including a poster spelling out Look at me! in large letters in the first post.
Or her parody of George Orwell's 1984 which talks about Way After 1984 and describes Winston Smith's typical day:
As he entered the lobby, a breeze stirred the 60-foot banner suspended high above from the roof. The three oh-so-familiar slogans of the Ministry were printed across the banner in large letters: REGISTRATION NOT LEGISLATION MONOPOLISATION IS INNOVATION WHERE DO YOU WANT TO GO TODAY?
See another sample of her writing, which those who've had to go through code reviews will especially appreciate.
The book is organized chronologically, with Verity's early writings listed first, and some of the unpublished material included at the end of the book. Overall, it's a pretty good and entertaining read, although in many cases the chapters made me scratch my head trying to get to the point of the joke. It's especially difficult with parodies, since if you don't quite know what is being parodied, it's hard to get the joke. The Register has another review and those British journalists called it painfully funny.
You can purchase The Best of Verity Stob from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
But she's no Thursday Next.
So I clicked, and ...
Nothing to see here, move along.
And so I thought, "And apparently, it still is!"
Only if they turn their head first.
Can't go wrong with modding a Clerks reference up!
You must have pissed off a bunch of people to get an automatic -1 Score for your comments. Nice.
That should be 1988. By 1998 things had already gone to hell, tech-support-wise.
Have you read my blog lately?
Virtual shooting Anonymous Cowards...
*Bang* Modded -1 Offtopic.
Super american dance party!!
Anytime, anywhere.
I hate to see Dilbert in a "funny" list with Futurama, Slashdot I can understand.
I though it was a news site...
Well that explains a lot... silly me
Gotta admit, the dotdotdot article does seem to ring a few bells.
A 6/10 is pretty low - especially for here; yet the review doesn't point out many flaws, except that the reviewer didn't understand some parts of the book.
The crew is down in Australia... User Friendly
Disclaimer: I've been up to my nose in language design lately, as a hobby to distract me from OLTP work. ...yes, I'm a geek.
The reviewer quotes a passage where the author complains about array accesses and function invocations in VB. Now, as a former VB wonk, I hate it as much as anyone outside of the FSF, but I'm not sure I agree with this.
From a certain point of view, having array accesses and function invocations be indistinguishable is a good thing. I mean, what is an array, if not a function over an integer domain that produces discrete results? I think we've all substituted sine functions with lookup tables before. (Okay, maybe not everybody.)
VB even goes a bit farther, using the function invocation syntax (e.g. "F(x)") only for functions that return values. Void functions (subroutines) are called as "F x". At least back when I was doing VB. So really, functions are more like arrays to the programmer than they are subroutines.
On the other hand, as a Smalltalk fan, I'd argue that having a dedicated array-accessor syntax is just sugar anyway. I'm going to crawl back under my desk now.
I used to read her column regularly when if was free on Dr. Dobbs, but then they started charging for it.
I have just ordered her book from Barnes & Noble. I heartily recommend it based on her columns.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
Wuvv you too schmoopykins! Now remove your Depends and lay down on the washing machine.
Now there's writing. Always amusing.
Sometimes thought-provoking.
Stan Kelly-Bootle is the man.
I don't personally care to Verity Stob.
My Heart Is A Flower
Slsahdot a source o geek humor? Well I guess not haha funny, but funny as in kicked in the balls funny.
A female... programmer? Hahahaha!
:)
Never thought I'd ever hear of one of those in my lifetime.
How the hell is this offtopic? It is probably the only post that has ANYTHING to do with the book or author.
But not unserved. There was all that stuff I was churning out...
The Dave Green ,Internet celebrity, raconteur, Oxford graduate but wearing a skirt...
-he who laughs last, is a bit slow.
journal
I think that Futurama is a hell of a lot funnier if you are a geek than not. I cracked up when I saw "Bender's Computerized Dating Service: Discrete and Discreet", but everyone else thought nothing of it. There are several more examples like that; it is full of geek humour.
If you don't understand Ms Stob's jokes, laugh anway and pretend that you do. Failure to do so will show your PFY status.
...is an absolute classic. So much so that Doctor Dobbs continues to get complaints about it from VB lovers who find it online.
What about the bastard operator from hell? That was classic geek humour, and a good role model.
Ditto for userfriendly! The strips seem to be a regular formula:
1: Hi
2: Some guy gets hurt
3: Haha the guy got hurt.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
The reviewer quotes a passage where the author complains about array accesses and function invocations in VB. Now, as a former VB wonk, I hate it as much as anyone outside of the FSF, but I'm not sure I agree with this.
The author is showing either bias (real or feigned for humor value) or ignorance. Given the context (computer humor) and the medium-old-hand status of someone who has been writing it for (only) 17 years.
The original language (Fortran) used parens for both subscription and function arguments, as did most of the languages of the time.
If I recall correctly, there were no square brackets on the 026 keypunch keyboard (though there might have been an overstrike code assigned for them).
EBCDIC and ASCII had square brackets. But terminals and keypunches using them weren't widely deployed until the late '60s or early '70s.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You're openly admitting that you've been in the industry for 18 years, and have never read Dr. Dobbs Journal? (Nor apparently have any clue as to what it is)
I can see that if you just entered the industry this millenium, but to be old school and not know about this publication is bordering on sacraligeous. One of the best technical programming journals there is.
No Comment.
Oops, left off the end of the sentence.
... I'm voting for it being feigned bias for humor value.
The author is showing either bias (real or feigned for humor value) or ignorance. Given the context (computer humor) and the medium-old-hand status of someone who has been writing it for (only) 17 years.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> I've been involved in computers and programming for 18 years and I've never even heard of her.
In that case you deserve the zero mod.
Yours sincerely,
the AC moderation board.
Interestingly, the Slashdot parts were deemed of no value.
> 3: Haha the guy got hurt.
Butbutbut, don't we love it when the marketroid gets it?
"crappy mainstreamed business journals"
Started in the mid 70's and originally called "Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia" subtitled "Running Light without OverByte" it's one of the best and longest running technical computer journals out there. Here's a link to help further your education.
http://webreview.com/ddj/history.htm
guys, is it just my connection or did you just slashdot Dr. Dobbs? Their server is *crawling* at the moment...
This comment does not exist.
You didn't expect the moderators to read, did you? Or understand? Hardly anyone reads the articles anymore.
That is why it is heading for the drain, comments have declined drastically last year.
While watching the Southpark episode with the evil Stan, Kyle & Cartman from an alternate dimension, I literally fell off the couch laughing at the fact that they all had goatees. It was fucking brilliant. None of my friends understood.
Don't miss her interview with a bulk emailer, from The Register.
Side-splitting stuff. If the book's half as good, it's a must-read.
D
.. but stopped in the 90's.
if you don't read DDJ, or its a 'mainstreamed business journal', what sort of programmer-tech literature/magazines do you read?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
For those of you thinking about buying the book, you'll save substantially if you buy from overstock.com as opposed to B&N. That's including tax (if applicable) and shipping. Even Amazon is way cheaper than B&N. Somewhat offtopic, but use PriceGrabber for comparison shopping.
Best moment... fist episode. Bender shits a brick.
Might be more funny situations, but that one moment, so classic. And it's even funny taken out of context.
And the Oscar for Best Picture goes to... "Man Getting Hit By Football", starring George C. Scott.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Ada had a similar problem. 'Nuff said.
Is there a BASIC that doesn't work this way? I can't blame it on VB when CBM BASIC, GWBASIC, QuickBASIC, VAX/DEC/HP BASIC for VMS, and TI BASIC all do the same.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
You have to be an old geek to get some of the jokes, like the time Bender shines the X-ray flashlight as his head and you can see a giant chip in his brain labelled `6502'. That cracked me up.. but would be about meaningless to anyone under 25 (or maybe 30, these days).
I cracked up when I saw "Bender's Computerized Dating Service: Discrete and Discreet"
You weren't the only one.
Whoever says Futurama isn't geek humor isn't paying attention...
I also like the Star Trek parodies:
"Is there anything to eat on this planet?"
"Well, it's a class M planet, so it should at least have Roddenberrys."
Even if you hate Star Trek, you gotta admit it makes great parody material.
Quite right. Stick to the museli, natural yoghurt and hemp-fibre smocks.
Stick Men
Right here. My favourite. An all-time classic.
Stick Men
On the other hand, as a Smalltalk fan, I'd argue that having a dedicated array-accessor syntax is just sugar anyway.
Yes, for instance in Ruby "[]" is just a method like any other, just with a funny calling syntax (there is also "[]=").
Example:
Call with:
This, like many other things in Ruby, makes it super-easy to refactor your code. Replace an Array with a Hash, or with your own class.
Yeah, the Smalltalk and Lisp fans got bored after the first sentence, but I thought I'd point it out.
Last year?
God this place went crap in 2000. Wake up!
That is a major improvement of the early days of userfriendly
1: Hi
2:
3: Some guy gets hurt
How's it going?
./ username Merdalors?
Why did you choose the
Are you a Francophile?
Be honest.
What I hate is this insane rush to slobber praise over any female who knows how to do anything more on a PC than create an Excel spreadsheet.
"A chick can code? WOW! She must be THE BEST CODER IN THE WORLD THEN! "
What a crock of shit.
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sue/475/cruft.html
Make that was. I stuck with DDJ for years until it suddenly occurred to me that the vast majority of the articles had become novice-level material. This was probably back in the late '90s. Maybe it's improved since.
I have to admit, "Verity"'s column is one of the things that got me to stop reading Dr. Dobbs for a while. I just didn't find it funny. Compared with the amazing Stan Kelly-Bootle's work, for example, she was nowhere with me.
I'm glad to see DDJ head back to its roots. I hope it travels farther in that direction
One of the best technical programming journals there is.
The editorials by Jon Erickson alone are worth the price of admission. DDJ is a magazine that knows what's happening in the computing world -- well as long as you ignore Pournelle's column anyway.
As far as you go, I agree with you.
Where this gets really distressing is that VB has a special feature that means that when you write (foo), what you're doing is requesting the default property of foo.
This leads to the deeply unpleasant distinction between f(var) where f is a function, which means 'call function f with var as the param', and s(var) where is a subroutine (VB for a function with no return value), which means 'call subroutine s with the default property of var as the param'.
If 'var' is, say, a textbox, and it's default property is its string contents, then you'll you have a very unobvious bug.
The solution, if you were wondering, is to say 'call s(var)', in which case it does the right thing, and pass var to the subroutine directly.
Treating arrays as classes is fine as far as it goes. Using (obj) as a method invocation on obj is as evil as you can get.
http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard.html/
http://www.userfriendly.org/contact/
UserFriendly.Org
140-8380 Lansdowne Road, Suite 716
Richmond,
British Columbia
Canada, V6X 1B9
But all us Commonwealth folks sound alike, right?
What's the catch? You will still have to register (nothing I can do about that) and fill out all those questions you love to hate but the link below will give you DDJ's premium/all access ($20 charge normally) for free. I'm reserving the right to pull it down pretty much any time but I'll try to leave it up for the weekend.
Cheers everyone. If you are not interested that's cool. My only point is to give something back, even if for a short period of time, since I read /. everyday. If you are interested, enjoy.
http://www.ddj.com/registration/?skeycode=DWSLDT01
For those of you having problems registering please send email to their webmaster who will likely get back to you on Monday... :)
It their very own fault for the disputing with Sun. It better they use Java. Here we are using Java since three years ago. We not only using Java for the programmer increase (though we are: maybe ten times, maybe twenty times) we also now use it for everything from the commanding line stuff such as grep through to the web engine beans. Same speed C but faster. The security we are finding, and with the IDE too (Borland or IBM). Portability of course is of the deal.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Tom Cruise! Oh no! You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! Show me the money! Oh no!
I may have to pick this one up. Of course, that means I'll also need to get a coffee table.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Uh, sorry. This place must be damaging my mental capability.
Funny funny... I'm a french canadian living in Nova Scotia, never spent more than three days in the UK :o)
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
I've heard of it, but I've never read it, and I don't think I've every known anyone (profs, other grads, my current coworkers, etc.), that reads it. For background, I got my BS in 2001 and MS in 2003, both in Computer Science, and I was a research assistant for awhile. I think I'm pretty well-rounded and don't see any grand deficiencies in my skills, other than my relative youth.
I'm guessing that, for programmers who've come up in recent years, it's more common to read websites (not to mention, websites are free).
My stupid web site
Female Programmer. Hah. If she was a real person, she would post on slashdot.
Click here to give me 1/250th of an Opera license!
I never found Verity Stob's article the least bit amusing whatsoever. In fact, after seeing more and more similar content in DDJ I cancelled my subscription. I was disappointed, but it was clear the emphasis had shifted from good technical articles (like a real journal would have) towards a political and entertainment medium. This may have been driven by the publishers, but it wasn't what I wanted to spend my money on.
But, VS isn't funny like User Friendly isn't funny. (that'll get me modded down for sure)
GOBACK.
1213212333222332212321 now that sounds like a lot of fun... ? 4 me. Dinkja
this post comes under the powers of Spec-Ops 31 (Good taste re-education authority). The pair of you are safe this time, but I'd watch your step in future. Any mention of that hack Pratchett and I'll nick the pair of you OK?
[You won't believe this but I am actually posting to you from Swindon]
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76