

Programmers Need To Learn Statistics or I Will Kill Them All - Zed Shaw - jamiequint
http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/programmer_stats.html
Rant from Zed Shaw of Mongrel Fame
======
staunch
I'm a huge fan of statistics for reporting, but I think his ideas about how to
use it in practical development is mostly broken.

Their team needed statistical analysis and charts to solve a 60 second
response time bug? That's just a total lack of basic debugging skills.

Eliminating all confounding and spending the time to test your application's
performance characteristics in a statistically valid way rarely makes sense.
If lives are on the line fine, but in most cases the reason for even
attempting it do so is bureaucratic. Release early, release often.

~~~
ph0rque
I mostly agree with you, but in the article, the slow component had a
subsecond response time with a 60 second deviation.

------
mynameishere
_I think women are better programmers because they have less ego and are
typically more interested in the gear rather than the pissing contest_

Here's a statistic: 99 percent of all achievements in computer science come
from men. But, hey, I'm no statistician, so maybe I'll just trust some off-
the-cuff twaddle from random jerks.

 _I try to show them how to properly graph a run chart and they're indignant._

Just wondering: Is this guy hacking device drivers? OpenGl? Maybe he's
tweaking the last bit of sweat out of microsoft's C++ compiler? No...he's
clearly doing CRUD work. Performance issues in CRUD work are solved by RAM and
memcached, not screwing around in Excel. That's why your co-workers are
indignant: You don't understand your trade.

 _If we want to only verify one single query on a database then what's
stopping us? Stupidity that's what._

Because there are 6000 queries, and not all of us can spend all-day-all-night
screwing around with Excel.

 _The classic example of this is the Pet Store_

"The Pet Store" isn't the classic example of jack.

 _Then I hit the DB2 database and about crapped my pants. Almost all of the
queries performed great, except one query that had sub-second response on
average, but a 60 second standard deviation!_

...my own statistics are a little rusty. If the average is .5, and the SD is
60, doesn't that mean that certain runs should be choking so hard that the log
file would...just freeze. I mean, break out the Excel if you want, but I've
seen log files choke before, and it's usually obvious what the problem is: The
entry at the bottom.

 _"It's not the database, it's IBM's DB2 configuration._

LOL. DB2's configuration being a part of...what then?

 _The next day we had IBM fixing the problem (turned out to be a single update
index command) and we all kept our jobs._

Our hero! (Self-proclaimed)

 _That's what a proper analysis method can do for you._

Or just watching the log file.

~~~
tx
_Is this guy hacking device drivers? OpenGl? Maybe he's tweaking the last bit
of sweat out of microsoft's C++ compiler? No...he's clearly doing CRUD work_

This guy wrote Mongrel, which is a very solid HTTP server - the most common
way to deploy Ruby applications these days. Also he was one of the guys on
ruby-lang who discovered nasty bugs in Ruby's threading implementation
(everybody else just preferred bitching about "unreliable" Ruby threads and
memory leaks)

~~~
jamesbritt
> the most common way to deploy Ruby applications these days

Say what? Are you sure you aren't conflating Ruby with Rails?

~~~
tx
No I am not. You can use mongrel with any framework you want.

~~~
jamesbritt
Framework?

Not every Ruby app is a Web app. I've written dozens of Ruby apps, but only
some of them run on the Web.

------
timr
I'm surprised that nobody has posted a link to the R language archive site:

<http://cran.r-project.org/>

R is a GPL project; there are free builds for the major operating systems,
including a nice graphical environment for OS X.

R is an incredibly useful language -- with only a little bit of effort, you
can do sophisticated statistical analyses that would take weeks to implement
in other languages. It's also a great tool for developing/prototyping
statistical machine-learning algorithms. Highly recommended.

------
0123456789
To quote the article: "I really can't blame them since they were probably told
in college that logic and reason are superior to evidence and observation."

Albert Einstein was criticized by the physics community for ONLY using "logic
and reason" to explain what he was proposing.

Don't be hasty and dismiss half the tools we have because YOU find them
useless.

------
FatBastard
The guy says programmers are shitpumps because they are men who are guided by
primate dominance reflexes not reason, and what do the programmers do in
response?

Start a pissing match of course.

I saved his page so I can study up. Also, my dick is bigger than yours and I
could kick your ass.

~~~
jamongkad
My gosh what is this Digg? there seems to be an increase in the number of
trolls recently.

