fhayashi: how do you support statements like "never had a technical role in the company"? I've worked through several hundred pages of code with his name on them, and many more later hacked up by other
ACSers. How is
coding not technical??
I've found Philip to be quite pragmatic and open in person, but in his writing he comes off as a brash person with severe technical bigotry. He explains why at one point: when he was writing his thesis, his advisor taught him not to wrap his arguments in deflective 'I think' or 'suppose that' statements. After all, it's obvious that what the author wrote is what he thinks; and it should be obvious to the reader not to take the author's words as gospel. Most readers are not used to being taken seriously by the author in modern writing, and it shows.
There is just one other thing about Philip's brashness that I came to understand recently. Most of the technology industry is obsessed with secrecy on the grounds that someone will steal all their ideas. After open-sourcing some code recently and trying to drag some groups kicking and screaming into the 80's, I came to understand Philip's persistence and abruptness as the practical invocation of Howard Aiken's statement:
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."