Peter Seebach

Haha, wow. I totally forgot I wrote that one.

When I wrote that I was unaware of some of the Sort Of Creepy stuff. I recognize that some of the allegedly creepy stuff is sorta misquoted. I think that matters. But I don't think it changes my overall conclusions, which is that RMS was acting in a way that he could reasonably predict would hurt or distress people, and he didn't think it was important to change this.

But I also note that, completely unaware of any of the allegations now being discussed, I thought he was bad for the development of free and open source software because he was bad at treating people in ways conducive to positive outcomes, and I knew many people who worked on free or open source software, or worked with the FSF or on FSF projects, who also felt that way. I believe quite a few of them had told him of these concerns.

I wrote about the specific more-recent RMS stuff last year:
https://www.seebs.net/log/post/2019/09/21/rms-minsky-and-the-search-for-truth/

Thomas Bushnell wrote about this, too, and honestly his post was much better:
https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84

It is perhaps worth noting that, maybe thirty years ago, I had some run-ins with Thomas Bushnell, and I thought he was sort of a jerk at the time, but when I called him out on an example of that, he acknowledged it and apologized and said he'd try to do better. Nothing external to RMS was preventing RMS from doing that if people said…

So probably neither one of them had achieved much in the way of liberation from attachment to sensory pleasure (and the other four hindrances: hate, dullness, anxiety, and doubt) or the resulting cessation of suffering, which is the point of Buddhism.

So either Buddhism doesn't work or Kerouac and Watts sucked at it. That, in turn, means that they are not reliable sources for information about how to do Buddhism.

That might be okay if you read Kerouac and then go find guidance on the path from someone who really is liberated, assuming that's possible, but how do you as a novice layperson tell the difference between a liberated Zen master and a charlatan? If US seekers were good at it, Kerouac's and Watts's books wouldn't be the bestsellers in the category, they'd be eclipsed by somebody whose practice of Buddhism in their own life was actually successful and who had trustworthy, well-grounded insights to share. So you're likely to replicate the errors that led you to Kerouac in the first place by choosing someone like Richard Baker as your teacher. Then, instead of getting liberated from suffering, you just get sexually exploited.

In particular, Kerouac kind of glorifies living heedlessly, and it was precisely that heedlessness that caused his death. Also, it was Richard Baker's heedlessness that caused so much suffering to his students, leaving scars in the community around the San Francisco Zen Center that continue to cause suffering, almost 30 years after his…

Try this:

http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/cclass.html

Once you can stand on your C legs, you should read the C-FAQ, here:

http://www.c-faq.com/

and get a copy of the C99 standard. It's supposed to be here:

http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG14/

but the site was unavailble when I tried to check it before writing this comment.

Various C-related stuff that is good to read:

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/duffs-device.html

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html

Take this with a pinch of salt:

http://www.seebs.net/faqs/c-iaq.html

I think that from "I spent about a decade on the C committee—and [2] unlike Schildt, I actually showed up [..]" we can assume that he has some kind of history with the person in question [1].

Peter seems also to get quite some share of hate mail [3].
Despite all that and the tone of the book review I think he is quite right about the bad quality of the book.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writings_of_Herbert_Schildt
[2] Peter Seebach, http://www.seebs.net/res-w.html
[3] http://www.seebs.net/humor/hate.html

I'm afraid that particular author is legendary for having been ridiculed, as far as the term "bullschildt" having been coined on Usenet.

The book was useful, if you ignored Schildt's annotations, and just used it to get the text of the standard (or most of it).

Review of the above book by Clive Feather:

https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/schildt.html

Of Schildt's C: The Complete Reference, by Peter Seebach:

https://www.seebs.net/c/c_tcn4e.html