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On Tuesday 12 October 2004 1:27 am, Adrian Midgley wrote:
On Monday 11 October 2004 12:16, Neil Williams wrote:Writing code does not cost any money.Aieie. I am not an economist (although from time to time I read it.) It has been accepted by sufficient people of considerable smartness and whose world-models seem to work that the concept of "opportunity cost" is valid.
WRONG. You assume that all activity 24/7 is worthy of income. I write code in my spare time, in my dreams, in the car - i.e. in circumstances where I am ALREADY doing something else which no-one in their right mind would charge for. Writing code does not cost any money BECAUSE IT IS NOT WORK. The people of 'considerable smartness' are dealing with issues of relevance to companies. I am not a company - I have time off and in that time off I code. I decide how much time off I have (courtesy of being self-employed in my work) and how much of that goes on code.
Whatever you do incurs an opportunity cost
Rubbish. Who pays for your sleep? Your dreams? Your time in the shower? I write code in all those situations.
- while you do it, even if only half your capacity is engaged, there are other things which you cannot be doing.
No human can earn money 24/7. Humans can plan, think and organise things 24/7 because the brain never switches off completely - that's part of the reason why we dream. Haven't you ever woken up with the solution to a problem that was bugging you the day before? Happens to me about once a week.
If some of the latter would generate revenue, or increase surplus value, then in every accounting convention I know anything of the activity is reckoned as if it is costing money.
Untrue. You are still treating this as a commodity, it's not, it's speech. Who is paying you for the work on the list? Who is losing out financially for your time on the list? This is not chargeable time - it's leisure time. It's FUN! I thought there was a working time directive - or have all those hours as a junior doctor jaded your perspective of work and leisure? :-)) I choose to work in pharmacy for the money. I don't have a choice about writing code, like an artiste or musician sometimes the darned stuff just oozes out of my brain and it's more than I can do to keep my fingers moving as fast as my brain. Why should I forget it all and let nobody benefit? I think therefore I code. For you breathing is fundamental and comes naturally - for me each breath has a little package of code attached. I can't help it, I can't stop it. It comes naturally and flows easily (mostly). The learning I do I do because I ENJOY it - it's my leisure activity. By your reasoning, fagging out in front of the goggle box for hours is losing money?? I am not a company, I am not an income stream. I am a human being with joys and fun and sidelines. There is more to life than money and for me, that extra something is a combination of a few things: 1. My cat 2. My car (with the roof down) 3. Code 4. Code. (in no specific order). Are you saying that the time spent stroking the cat is costing me money? Tosh. All humans need relaxation and sleep - I choose to code as relaxation. Some read books, I write code. Simple. I went on holiday for 4 weeks in May/June and wrote some 600 lines of code. OK, some were junk, but then even the great masters didn't produce masterpieces every time!
Writing code is in theory more economical than Chess
Writing code has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with relaxation, enjoyment and hobbies. When you talk to your wife in the evening after a day at the healthcare grindstone, do you charge her to listen to you? Does she charge you? Code is speech - it is free in every sense. I did really well at a variety of languages at school - ended up with the same points score for languages as I had for sciences. It was 50:50 which way to go and I still pick up languages with not a lot of work. To me, writing code is just holding a conversation with the computer. I say my bit, the computer throws a segmentation fault and I talk some more!!! :-) Not only is code a form of speech, speech is a form of code! Every language uses a recognised code with syntax and keywords. It's just another shoot from the original language. Code is written in English - one of the reasons why English is the most common second language - it has a syntactical root close to Latin or Ancient Greek and commonalities with Ancient Hebrew and Arabic/Persian tongues. All code is written in a language - albeit a language created for a specific purpose by human beings, but then aren't all languages created that way?? The purpose changes but the meaning remains. Code has many parts: 1. final source code - all nice and polished, well laid out, with sensible variable names and working structures. 2. Working code: full of nonsense variables, wasted structures, spurious comments and dead-ends. 3. Pseudo-Code: Much closer to English - cannot be compiled directly but, like a storyboard, forms the plan and the design of the working code. 4. Documentation : The one area that most programmers find hard. Each is a language of it's own. Each is a true form of speech.
in that no clock is required and it can be done by one person (Chess, a game requiring a clock and two players. A board and pieces may optionally be used, and are found convenient by many) however it commonly implies a computer, and a roof, and a chair and in short _goods_, which each have capital and revenue consequences of their own - in short, they are reckoned by the common man (on the Clapham omnibus with his Palm Pilot) as costing money.
Rubbish. Those things would be present anyway. What they do does not affect their capital cost. Does a car cost less if it's in the garage? Does your house value increase because you work more hours? These things might happen if other events also happen, like spending some of the extra money on the house, but without these secondary events, the result will not occur. Logic dictates that if A cannot cause B without C also occurring, then A does not cause B. It may increase the probability, but probability is not cause. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk/ http://www.dclug.org.uk/ http://www.isbn.org.uk/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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