Re: Top 10 most common hard skills listed on resumes...

On 17/09/2024 20:08, James Kuyper wrote:

On 9/16/24 13:13, David Brown wrote:

On 16/09/2024 18:19, James Kuyper wrote:

...

The C standard is also incapable of being wrong, but in a very different
sense - the C standard defines C, there is no alternative to compare it
with, in order to say that the C standard is wrong. The C standard might
be inconsistent, unimplementable, badly designed, or incomprehensible,
among many other defects if might have - but as the official definition
of C, it cannot be wrong.
Any such defects can be corrected by filing a defect report and
convincing the committee that the report is correct. If they agree, the
next version of the standard is likely to contain revised wording to
address the issue. Try doing that with the Bible.

>
At the risk of offending people, I'd say this /has/ been done with the
Bible countless times.  There are dozens of major versions of the Bible
with different selections of books and sections of the books.  There are
hundreds of translations for each version, even counting just
translations into English, based on different source texts and very
different styles of translation.  And that's before you get to major
re-writes, like Mormonism (though perhaps that's more akin to moving
from C to Rust).

 There's a key difference: there's a central authority responsible for C,
the ISO C committee. Defect reports must be filed with them, and new
versions of the C standard are issued by them.

There is that difference, yes.  But the central authority is quite aloof - few of them deign to communicate directly to us mere mortals very often, and it is not uncommon to hear in discussions about the standards "when they wrote /this/, they really meant /that/" or fixed beliefs about how parts of the standard are to be interpreted.
And there was a central (very human) authority responsible for the original formation of the Bible - not for writing the individual books, but at least for choosing which books were included in the anthology.
However, the C standards have a much clearer and more realistic procedure for changes - both small fixes (defect reports) and major changes (new versions).

 The different versions of the Bible that you refer to generally
correspond to schisms in the community of Believers, with one version of
the Bible accepted by one side of the split, and a different version by
the other side, with neither side accepting the authority of the other
to determine which version is correct.

Yes.
But even within the groups that nominally accept the same version of the Bible, there are subgroups that rely on different translations with significantly different interpretations or implications.

 The authority for the Bible that corresponds to the C committee for the
C standard should be God, but to an atheist like me, it's not clear that
He's playing any active public role in clarifying which version of the
Bible should be used. If He's taking any active role, it would appear to
be in the form of telling individual Believers which version they should
believe, with different Believers reporting having gotten different
advice from Him on the matter.
 

Unlike C, it is not a nice linear progression with each new version
superseding the previous versions.  But we still do see some "C90
fanatics" that are as convinced in their viewpoint as some King James fans!

 The C90 fanatics do seem to be a good analogy to the Christian
schismatics. They basically don't accept the authority of ISO to change
the C standard, despite the fact that it became a standard under ISO
auspices. However, they are not organized into a coherent group like the
schismatic churches have been.
 

I think that for any belief or cause - good or bad, real or imagined - there are always some people who follow it so fanatically that it is their fanaticism that dominates, not the belief or cause.
Perhaps we have milked this comparison enough - it's not really good c.l.c. topicality.  I personally find religious history and related topics fascinating, and am easily drawn into discussions about it, but there are no doubt more appropriate arenas.