It started much earlier than that, when the CIA took over Nazi Muslim terrorist networks after WWII, and from that started working with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s. Ian Johnson's _A Mosque In Munich_ is a must-read if you are at all interested in why 9/11 happened:
Privately, President Eisenhower seemed concerned about how to reach the Muslim world. He wrote to his confidant, the Presbyterian church leader Edward Elson, that Islam and the Middle East were always on his mind. “I assure you that I never fail in any communication with Arab leaders, oral or written, to stress the importance of the spiritual factor in our relationships. I have argued that belief in God should create between them and us the common purpose of opposing atheistic communism.” In White House meetings he was more blunt. Speaking with the CIA covert operations czar Frank Wisner and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Eisenhower said that Arabs should dip into their own religion for inspiration in fighting communism. “The President said he thought we should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,’ according to a memo outlining the conversation. “Mr. Dulles commented that if the Arabs have a ‘holy war they would want it to be against Israel. The President recalled, however, that [King Ibn] Saud, after his visit here, had called on all Arabs to oppose Communism.” The Operations Coordinating Board — the body set up to imple- ment covert plans by the CIA and other agencies — took up Islam. It had already produced a detailed study of Buddhism and how that religion could be used to further U.S. interests. In 1957, the board established an Ad Hoc Working Group on Islam that included offi- cials from the U.S. Information Agency, the State Department, and the CIA. According to a memo on the groups first meeting, its goal was to take stock of what public and private U.S. organizations were doing in the field of Islam and come up with an “Outline Plan of Operations.’ The plan had two main components, both of which were echoed in CIA actions in Munich. First, the United States would shun traditional Muslims in favor of “reform” groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Then, as today, the Brotherhood’s radi- cal political agenda of a return to a mythic state of pure Islam was obfuscated by its members’ use of modern symbols, such as West- ern clothing and rhetoric. “Both the Chairman and the CIA mem- ber felt that with the Islamic world being divided as it is between reactionary and reformist groups, it might be found profitable to place emphasis on programs which would strengthen the reformist groups.” In May, the coordination board passed the inventory and plan of action. Its statements were clear and simple: Islam is a natural ally, communists are exploiting Islam, and Islam affects the balance of power. The paper listed a dozen recommendations for strengthen- ing ties with Islamic organizations, especially those with a strong anticommunist bent. As always, the operations were to be covert. “Programs which are indirect and unattributable are more likely to be effective and will avoid the charge that we are trying to use reli- gion for political purposes,’ the report concluded. “Overt use of Is- lamic organizations for the inculcation of hard-line propaganda is to be avoided”
What? There is not one mention in that wall of words of any Muslim groups being either Nazis or terrorists. If you knew Hitler's plans for the Arabs you would know it doesn't even make sense. This smacks of far-right Israeli propaganda.
Thank you for the data, some of which, I'll say with qualification, was new to me. I would say information but it took a lot of wading through unrelated and tangentially related links to find what you are talking about.
I recommend reading the book (Ian Johnson's A Mosque In Munich: Nazis, The CIA, And The Rise Of The Muslim Brotherhood In The West) because it is the first (and, AFAIK, so far only) study where all the "tangentially related links" are explained in context. Johnson did an excellent job of perusing West German and newly declassified CIA documents, as well as tracking down and interviewing surviving participants of the events. It is not something you can credibly explain in one post.
I guess I don't understand the writer's, or your, focus on the fact they were Muslim when the CIA, and adversarial intelligence agencies generally recruit opportunistically from any disaffected groups.
Because that is what the book is about. Specifically, about the history of the Islamic Center of Munich, regularly attended by Mahmoud Abouhalima, the 1993 WTC bomber, and Al Qaeda co-founder and bin Laden mentor Mamdouh Mahmud Salim. I don't know what you are trying to imply. As suggested previously, read the book.
"Because that is what the book is about." Is your intention to promote a book? I thought it was to make a point was about US alliances and supporting for terrorists and other unsavoury types going back a long time.
That argument would only be stronger if you left it broad by including US support for Catholic Guatemalan dictators and Italian fascists, Protestant White South Africans, Orthodox fascists during the Greek civil war or useful nazis generally. These all predate 1957 but instead you single out Muslim groups to make a more narrow point? I'm just wondering if you have something against Muslims.
You just copy-and-paste the relevant input-output and there is your test. There isn't a need for any extra tools when using the REPL to come up with regression tests (obviously a REPL cannot be used to do TDD).
TDD use would be a lot different if people actually bothered to read the entirety of Kent Beck's _Test Driven Development: By Example_. It's a lot to ask, because it is such a terribly written book, but there is one particular sentence where Beck gives it away:
> This has happened to me several times while writing this book. I would get the code a bit twisted. “But I have to finish the book. The children are starving, and the bill collectors are pounding on the door.”
Instead of realizing that Kent Beck stretched out an article-sized idea into an entire book, because he makes his money writing vague books on vague "methodology" that are really advertising brochures for his corporate training seminars, people actually took the thing seriously and legitimately believed that you (yes, you) should write all code that way.
So a technique that is sometimes useful for refactoring and sometimes useful for writing new code got cargo-culted into a no-exceptions-this-is-how-you-must-do-all-your-work Law by people that don't really understand what they are doing anymore or why. Don't let the TDD zealots ruin TDD.
This seems to be the case with a lot of "methodologies" like TDD, Agile, XP, etc. as well as "XXX considered harmful"-style proscriptions.
A simple idea ("hey, I was facing a tricky problem and this new way of approaching it worked for me. Maybe it will help you too?") mutates into a blanket law ("this is the only way to solve all the problems") and then pointy-haired folks notice the trend and enshrine it into corporate policy.
But Fred Brooks was right: there are no silver bullets. Do what works best for you/your team.
The 2000s design-patterns-mania is another case. Design patterns should be thought of less as things you have to memorize and apply in a textbook fashion, and more like tropes: things you'll see over and over in code, and once you know their names you can start talking about them and their interactions in meaningful ways. Just as writers like tropes because they make the job of writing easier, overuse of them is a sign of laziness; and so it is with design patterns.
The fun thing about this book (which I haven't read in it's entirety) is that it really shuts down a lot of the maximalist ideas in a few places (here's one particular section).
There are really two questions lurking here:
How much ground should each test cover?
How many intermediate stages should you go through as you refactor?
You could write the tests so they each encouraged the addition of a single line of logic and a handful of refactorings. You could write the tests so they each encouraged the addition of hundreds of lines of logic and hours of refactoring. Which should you do?
Part of the answer is that you should be able to do either. The tendency of Test-Driven Developers over time is clear, though - smaller steps. However, folks are experimenting with driving development from application-level tests, either alone or in conjunction with the programmer-level tests we've been writing.
Indeed. I read the book in hopes of getting a good intro to TDD after only picking it up by osmosis (which, as proven by the discussions here, is not a good way to learn TDD) and it definitely goes against the maximalist interpretation as described in TFA. While there are examples showing the minimal code-approach he is very explicit about the fact that you don't have to write your code that way.
One thing I liked specifically was his emphasis on the idea that you can use TDD to adjust the size of your steps to match the complexity of the code. Very complex? Small steps with many tests, maybe using the minimal code-approach to get things going. Simple/trivial? A single test and the solution immediately with no awkward step in between.
You have got to be kidding. Beck's book - both TDD: By Example and Extreme Programming - are very well written and have about the highest signal/noise ratio of any programming books.
_Test Driven Development: By Example_ certainly had the highest ratio of dumb unnecessary jokes to contrived unconvincing examples of any programming book I have read. My copy of TAOCP volume 3 doesn't even begin to compare. Clearly Knuth was doing something wrong.
> > This has happened to me several times while writing this book. I would get the code a bit twisted. “But I have to finish the book. The children are starving, and the bill collectors are pounding on the door.”
I wonder how much methodologies, books are written with the same banal driver. It is somebody's livelihood and they don't pay writers to stop middle of it because they realize its flawed.
I once found a book on triangular currency arbitrage or something like that at my library. It was 4000 pages long and the book was heavy. The book would ramble on in languages that made it difficult to follow and would be filled with mathmetical notations to the brim which really offered no value because the book was written in the 70s and it no longer offered any executable knowledge. But finance schools swear by it and speaking out would trigger a lot of people.
TDD is a cult. Science is also a cult in that manner, it rejects the existence of what it cannot measure and it gangs up on those that go against it.
There are much better tools for doing that, such as Guix profiles and nix-shell, which also happen to be better tools for making container images. Linux container images are a distribution mechanism that does not do anything to address package and dependency management other than shifting the problem somewhere else.
nix/guix are also good solutions, but they have a much higher learning curve than a Dockerfile; I would even be willing to suggest that docker is not the true best solution to any problem it solves, but in my experience it is the easiest solution to most of them
Languages where blocks are indicated by indentation are not context-free (you have to keep the current and previous line indentation level as state). Everything about them is more tedious because you can't do structured editing.
And I know many become an indentation shift. This can be a lot more intrusive then just moving a paren. I personally find it harder to match indentation shifts. (Excepting simple one liners, of course.)
I usually do the alignment with tab: my Emacs wisp-mode knows the indentation levels in use in the file, so it’s just shift-tab to go back to the previous scope and tab to nest more deeply.
One observation I made is that wrapping an expression around several lines is often less intrusive, because I can simply insert a line before the block that uses only half the indentation.
The paradox is this is at a time when the population has never been more numerous and the economy more prosperous. There should be more specialists in all kinds of areas, not fewer. Instead capitalism is reducing people's horizons and impoverishing their choices of vocation and lifestyle, destroying the landbase while simultaneously driving the people that try to maintain the landbase and natural systems out of work, and in many cases into prison slave labor. It is a self-destructive cycle steering us into civilizational collapse.
I would be surprised if we had fewer specialists, either in absolute numbers or in relative numbers. The fields of specialization might have changed over time. Maybe many people who would've become botanists a hundred years ago now are geneticists or something like that.
David Gelernter is a whole other piece of work. He did co-author a pretty good textbook on parallel programming (_How To Write Parallel Programs_), but the guy was basically a huckster when it came to distributed systems research. The real ironic thing is that it can be hard to tell Gelernter's Wall Street Journal op-eds from Kaczynski's manifesto.
That was back when hardware was changing to a significant degree, though. Nowadays, there ain't really much that's new about hardware today v. hardware from 10 or 20 years ago - hence operating systems / filesystems being able to remain mostly stable instead of suffering from the exact same problem.
