Wednesday, December 25, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Sean Punch

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I know that when I write, I'm writing for people who can handle high-school math, read at the Grade 12 level, and appreciate subtle humor as opposed to the toilet-bowl kind. I guess that makes the lower cutoff about 17-18 years old.
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Steve Jackson Games Forums
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Answer to the question about which age group GURPS is aimed at

 
Sean Punch

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There are people who say “I'll never need this math -- these trig identities from 10th grade or 11th grade.” Or maybe you never learned them. Here's the catch: whether or not you ever use the math that you learned in school, the act of having learned the math established a wiring in your brain that didn't exist before, and it's the wiring in your brain that makes you the problem solver.

 
Neil deGrasse Tyson
 

An integral approach acknowledges that all views have a degree of truth, but some views are more true than others, more evolved, more developed, more adequate. And so let's get that part out of the way right now: homophobia in any form, as far as I can tell, stems from a lower level of human development — but it is a level, it exists, and one has to make room in one's awareness for those lower levels as well, just as one has to include third grade in any school curriculum. Just don't, you know, put those people in charge of anything important.

 
Ken Wilber
 

[About drunks.] So, now you've got to go. So you come into the bathroom, close the door; now, don't forget: you owe this to yourself. You've worked hard all week. It's come to this: [leans on his stage chair like a toilet] "Ooooohhhhhh...eeeeehhhhh.....ahh, Jesus... Oh, God... if You get me out of this, I'll never drink again as long as I live... " Now you are ready...to put your face...in a place...that was never built for your face. "Ohhhhh!" Now you feel it coming, so you say "holding on! Holding on! We're going for a ride, yes! Bring it on, yes! Here it comes, I'm ready to explode!" [Imitates someone vomiting into a toilet.] And your muscles lock, everything! And you would not be surprised...you would not be surprised...if you saw your SHOES come out of your mouth! Now that wave has stopped, you say "Oouough!" And you put your head on the side of the bowl...and you thank the toilet bowl! "Thank you, toilet bowl. Thank you for being so cool on the side. Only you understand me, toilet bowl. You're the only friend I have. My wonderful toilet bowl."

 
Bill Cosby
 

Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.

 
Robert Benchley
 

You see, some people have a talent for programming. At ten to thirteen years old, typically, they're fascinated, and if they use a program, they want to know: “How does it do this?” But when they ask the teacher, if it's proprietary, the teacher has to say: “I'm sorry, it's a secret, we can't find out.” Which means education is forbidden. A proprietary program is the enemy of the spirit of education. It's knowledge withheld, so it should not be tolerated in a school, even though there may be plenty of people in the school who don't care about programming, don't want to learn this. Still, because it's the enemy of the spirit of education, it shouldn't be there in the school.
But if the program is free, the teacher can explain what he knows, and then give out copies of the source code, saying: “Read it and you'll understand everything.” And those who are really fascinated, they will read it! And this gives them an opportunity to start to learn how to be good programmers.
To learn to be a good programmer, you'll need to recognize that certain ways of writing code, even if they make sense to you and they are correct, they're not good because other people will have trouble understanding them. Good code is clear code that others will have an easy time working on when they need to make further changes.
How do you learn to write good clear code? You do it by reading lots of code, and writing lots of code. Well, only free software offers the chance to read the code of large programs that we really use. And then you have to write lots of code, which means you have to write changes in large programs.
How do you learn to write good code for the large programs? You have to start small, which does not mean small program, oh no! The challenges of the code for large programs don't even begin to appear in small programs. So the way you start small at writing code for large programs is by writing small changes in large programs. And only free software gives you the chance to do that.

 
Richard M. Stallman
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