Thank you for that point and well spotted. For me it's very striking what we manage to say about even these real people. I want to give specific examples. But later in the week now. Thanks.

Thanks for those words JC.

TBYJ: I'm willing to organise a meal in the City for you with ex-employees and associates of Objective, such as Mike Storey, David Byrne, David Briant and Steve Cook, now of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, the founding chairman of the British Computer Society's OOPS Specialist Group (OOPS standing for Object-Oriented Programming and Systems), who invited me, as a young practitioner, to be on the committee from day one in 1985 and is now linked to me on LinkedIn, for what that's worth. Steve also roped me in to the committee of the European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) in Nottingham in 1989, at which I talked to Jean-Marie Hullot about his choice of Objective-C for Steve Jobs and NeXT, as discussed with you and Martin A here in May. I have filing cabinets full of the residue from those days. Or we could sup with Tom Gilb when he's in in town. Somewhere in my effects there's my two page paper from OOPS-30, the brilliant meeting for early object practitioners organised by Bruce Anderson in 1990, describing five projects in which Objective had used objects in an evolutionary way and the relevance I saw they had for those early agile techniques of Gilb. But really. I'm not saying that Cook, Anderson and Gilb didn't have lots to offer too. But this was the ground out of which this pale plant grew. Are you willing to meet with me to go through some of this, given your stated interest in the subject? It seems a generous offer from where I'm currently sitting. :)

I'm asking you to meet with me TBYJ. Then this ridiculousness can end. What search engine optimisation benefit could there be behind my kind invitation for us to meet?

So when Geoff Chambers, Robin Guenier, Alex Cull and I met at the offices of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists earlier in the year, you think there was nothing to be gained for any of the three men? Or are they also in the boorish category merely by dint of this extraordinary lack of judgment on their part? And does the same apply to all those climate sceptics that have made the mistake of meeting me over the years? I won't name further names, lest the SEO benefits send me into a veritable seventh heaven of Larry Page's famous ranking.

Come on TBYJ. You can do better than this. I remember the days your putdowns really counted for something!

I was asking you to clarify your own view. It's fine for you to think that you are vastly superior to me. But isn't the implication of what you've been saying that you consider yourself vastly superior to almost everyone else on Bishop Hill? Or have I misunderstood?

My own position is that we have many different kinds of skills and experiences here and that we need the combination, working together. I certainly don't think that my own experience in software engineering, which has almost wholly not been applied to scientific application, is the last word on the subject for climate. Geoff Chambers and Robin Guenier have done less programming than me but have distinctly different things to offer. I really value those skills and experience.

I get the impression that you wish to single me out as the least qualified of all BH contributors but I wanted to check. What's your view of these other contributors, given that they don't have the background you've described for yourself in physics and/or C++ programming? I want to be sure of the basis on which you're singling me out, with Dung, for such 'special treatment'.

So you do feel vastly superior to them? :)

On fame-seeking see my comment on the other thread. On being saved, does this perchance relate to your prediction that I will be banned if I continued to disagree with Dung and TBYJ? I said at the time that was barmy. I'm hoping for your sake that it was misjudgment, not a statement of intent. But even if this has been the plan from the beginning it too must be kidology. This latest interaction in which I've tried to defend a fragment or two of my good name in the face of your strange and reckless diatribes has taken a couple of BH discussion threads off topic for less than a day only. Except, as I've realised of late, even that isn't true:

Reputations and Rapport has turned into a workshop not a retrospective!

Everything we need to learn is already here. Remarkable. Thanks where it is due :)

In the light of this I'm going to hibernate for a day or two, at least from BH discussions, and this might go straight into the month or two for all of BH I originally planned. It's what megalomaniacs do in the autumn, when our power has reached its zenith and there is no more of the quivering world left to subdue :)