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Re^5: Perl Golf Ethics

by blazar (Canon)
on Jan 04, 2007 at 20:46 UTC ( [id://593013]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re^4: Perl Golf Ethics
in thread Perl Golf Ethics

Your assessment of my concerns as "sour grapes" and "rubbish" is noted.

So what? He, along with others, explained in several different details and in multiple posts why your concerns "seem like sour grapes". (I couldn't find the word "rubbish" at all in the post you're replying to - please take care when you make attributions.) But what should we read in this? That you took offense? And regard it as an ad hominem attack, a' la "you're not my friend anymore"? If so, then I find this grossly irrespectful to us all and non-constructive in a very bad manner, not to say childish. If you have real argumentations, then please expand them. But the more or less general consensus here is that your concerns are not well founded, and people brought good argumentations as to why they are not. So I guess you will have a hard time to confute them. It's certainly easier to dismiss them with your claim that you "thought it was a challenge of cleverness and coding skill, not research and being in-the-know". (As you wrote elsewhere in this thread.) In fact I think your point is void and I'll try to explain why as kindly as possible.

Basically what you've been claiming, boasting I'd dare to say, in all this thread is that you had been playing under "higher ethical rules", implicitly suggesting that searching for previous golf competitions and solutions would be "unethical": a misunderstood conception of ethicity. Actually, following the same line of reasoning we should never read books or try to learn or exercise or train, but just try to be as clever as possible. Not a wrong thing in and of itself, but cleverness doesn't grow out of nothing. Maybe we should not teach kids ho to do sums, but challenge them and see if they discover by themselves. Maybe we should not teach students e.g. the Theory of Ordinary Differential Equations, but challenge them and see if they discover by themselves.

Fortunately, we "live on the shoulders of giants": we have a huge heritage from the past. Avoiding to take advantage of that doesn't sound as particularly smart nor "ethical". Granted, some kids who happen to be extremely gifted do rediscover things before they are taught to them. Just as you may rediscover some golfing technique while challenging your coding skills. Of course Perl Golf is only a minor aspect of human culture, but the same rules apply: the truth is that however clever they are, people just have to study and apply. Indeed I bet that even some of the wonderfully skilled golfers who took part to this thread didn't become such out of the blue, but out of study and application. And study and application in this context may mean to do searches and/or "being in-the-know".

To prevent your next move, I guess you'll make me notice that things are different in this case because we're talking about a competition. To which in turn I answer with another question: so an athlete preparing for a competition should not take advantage of prior art in training for similar competitions?!? That plainly doesn't make sense to me, just as most of your complains and concerns. Matters would be quite different if previous knowledge were not publicly available, in which case to uncover it would require to break some sort of protection. (And would raise the question of ethicity on part of the person holding it, for not sharing it for the advancement of the art and retaining it for exclusive personal advantage, but that's a whole another story.)

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