Richard Bornat, one of the authors of The camel has two humps (about a supposed bimodal distribution of programming ability) recently wrote:
I did a number of very silly things whilst on the SSRI and
some more in the immediate aftermath, amongst them writing
“The camel has two humps”. I’m fairly sure that I
believed, at the time, that there were people who couldn’t
learn to program and that Dehnadi had proved it. Perhaps I
wanted to believe it because it would explain why I’d so
often failed to teach them.
Title and excerpt aside, this isn’t really a retraction of the actual test, just of the author’s overly-aggressive interpretation thereof. Basically he says that the test does have some predictive power but not enough to prove anything about who can or can’t pass a programming class.
Richard Bornat, one of the authors of The camel has two humps (about a supposed bimodal distribution of programming ability) recently wrote:
Read the rest: Camels and humps: a retraction.
Title and excerpt aside, this isn’t really a retraction of the actual test, just of the author’s overly-aggressive interpretation thereof. Basically he says that the test does have some predictive power but not enough to prove anything about who can or can’t pass a programming class.
Did someone actually use an ad-hominem argument against themselves to destroy the credibility of their own paper?
Fascinating.
Will this start a new wave of “sorry, I was high when writing the paper, please don’t take it seriously” retractions?
:D