How I do my computing (2006-2022) | Hacker News Reader

How I do my computing (2006-2022)

stallman.org

60 pointsscrlk52 comments

> First, read a textbook about programming in some language, then manuals for several programming languages including Lisp. If they make natural intuitive sense to you, that indicates your mind is well-adapted towards programming.

> If they don't make intuitive sense to you, I suggest you do something other than programming. You might be able to do programming to some degree with a struggle, but if you find it a struggle you won't be very good at it and you won't enjoy it. What's the point of programming if it is a struggle instead of a fascination?

I find this gatekeeping at odds with RMS's insistence that all software should be open source. What is the purpose of open source, if you can't do anything with the source code?

Whether or not you agree with the "open source everything" mantra, I would think that philosophy necessarily depends on more people having more programming literacy.

Personally, I believe more people should learn programming (at least at a basic level) partly because I believe in open source, and vice versa.

Couldn't agree more. Like (I suspect) many people, I learned very little from textbooks. I learned by tinkering with source code and talking to people smarter than me.

Counterpoint: part of how I learned from smarter people was to copy their habits, and part of their habits was to read good books with good practices.

Learning how to read non-fiction books, as I discovered, is actually a skill that needs to be learned, as my historian friends who wolf down thirty books in a week will tell you (the trick is to read only the parts you need instead of reading cover to cover, though I am still learning how to learn).

And counterpoint to counterpoint: While fields in the humanities are 'book-based', CS is mostly 'article-based'. And furthermore, on the bleeding edge, textbooks don't exist yet, documentation is shoddy, and sometimes you have to read the original source code.

Reading only the parts you need sounds awfully like consulting the docs, source, or talking to other people (stack overflow, Reddit, etc falls into this category for me).

every time i see someone say 'If they don't make intuitive sense to you, I suggest you do something other than programming.' it reminds me of Andrew Kelley's (creator of Zig) first SO question

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7880/how-do-you-open-a-f...

To me it’s obvious there’s a ton of intuition that led to that question.

That's a bad example. I know someone that spent a year trying to program and they couldn't frame a question like this.

Amazing. This from a guy who couldn't even figure out the python repl.

The Python repl isn't really anything like a Lisp is it? Like you can run the interpreter interactively, but every language has that. That's not a Lisp REPL where you can edit and save code while it's running and then just commit it. Unless I am missing some awesome features of the python repl :)

No, not "every language" has a REPL. Most languages I have worked with don't. It's true that python doesn't have hot-reloading, and that its built-in REPL is less powerful than Emacs. But not every lisp has all of that power, either. And personally, I find the Jupyter notebook to offer all that I'd ever want from Emacs, with a better interface.

But REPL stands for "read, eval, print loop." My kitchen knife doesn't fail to be a knife because it's missing the corkscrew, flashlight and screwdrivers of a Swiss army knife.

I meant every scripting language.

I've been thinking a lot about this, too. I believe open source software is beneficial even for non-programmers; if anything else, the preservation of the software isn't completely dependent on the goodwill of the company providing it when the source is freely available under generous licensing terms. If the maintainers of the software do something unpopular, then if enough people complain and there are enough technically-minded people willing to do something about it, then something will be done, which is more than what can be said compared to the "well, tough luck" attitude of many commercial software companies. While the FOSS ecosystem isn't completely immune from these things (e.g., the controversies surrounding GNOME, systemd, and Wayland and the resentment that some users have), it's easier for those using the FOSS ecosystem to adapt their computer environments to their own preferences rather than having to accept whatever Microsoft/Apple/Google/Adobe/etc. does. Personalization is an important part of the personal computing experience and should be preserved.

Even so, the complexity of today's software is a challenge to the idea of an open source software ecosystem where users are encouraged to use and modify their tools as they see fit. Even though I've been programming for more than 20 years, learning the code bases of modern desktop software products like KDE, GNOME, LibreOffice, and Firefox is a major undertaking. This is why I'm very interested in the research behind Alan Kay's STEPS project (http://rickardlindberg.me/writing/alan-kay-notes/tr2012001_s...), which attempted to implement an entire desktop environment (including an office-like application) in just 20,000 lines of code. The researchers accomplished this through the liberal use of domain-specific languages to define subsystems and applications. If our software stack was less complex and easier to understand, then it would be easier for users to learn how to understand and modify the code making up the software they use.

With all due respect to Stallman, that's some of the worst advice I've ever read. I guess I should have never learned to program, according to him, even though I have always been fascinated with it despite the uninspiring books I read.

I don't see it as gate keeping. I see it as, if it doesn't click for you and you don't enjoy it, don't push yourself.

Okay, but just taking that advice at face value, doesn't it conflict with RMS's ideas about open source?

Not at all.

>I find this gatekeeping at odds with RMS's insistence that all software should be open source. What is the purpose of open source, if you can't do anything with the source code?

Asking to/paying whomever you want and not calling the software maker or one of its licensees. Stallman is a libertarian, his theory is planted firmly on a market or a cooperative community.

EDIT: Let's be pedantic: for those reasons GNU and himself insist on free/libre software, openness of the source grants your eyeballs to read the source, but you however may just be in the situation where you are evaluating a software under EULA, so: you can read it but can't modify the slightest line (and recompile).

> I find it bizarre that people now use the term "coding" to mean programming. For decades, we used the word "coding" for the work of low-level staff in a business programming team.

I totally agree. I also don't understand why people who use the term "coding" make themselves smaller than the activity they actually mean, "programming". Programming is so much more than just {en|de}coding (given) stuff…

My nickname disagrees!

Yes, Tactical Coder vs Strategic Programmer.

They do it because they did not live in the decades where coding was used for the work of low level staff. Language changes, chances are that you also use words and phrases in an other context than where they were used decades before your time.

I don’t really care and just use code as shorthand. I’ve never worked in the past 30 years where there were programmers and then low level coders doing stuff. We were all the same.

There are people who can code and people who can’t. And people who code are sometimes good and sometimes bad.

For me coder == programmer == developer == engineer and should just mean you can create software.

I’ve always found people who argue over this stuff pedantic and ran into people who thought “programmers are lowly, I’m a X” usually sucked.

Yes, I agree, I feel the term "code" potentially misleading. But even "programming" can look as a triviality when presented in schools with no context and simplistic exercises. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3571785.3574125

I’m sure I appreciate a lot of what Stallman has done for me directly and indirectly, but this dude is intense about computer usage to the point where the extremism is a bit much for me to admire

Someone's gotta push the extremes so most of us can exist in the middle and still make progress.

Although he is a bit radical, I have a harder time trying to comprehend how people put up with Windows nowadays.

It feels like people will put up with anything that MS makes up. If Windows asked for a credit card number, people would happily offer one.

I actually like that there are people out there like the dude/RMS.

I don’t necessarily want to emulate him or hire people like him, but I’m glad he’s here and grateful for what he’s done.

I think that if you try to grind down the rough parts of people like RMS, you lose the genius. So I take people for a whole given that their net benefit is enough and they don’t have some catastrophic flaw.

The style he writes with is something I frequently encountered from my more opinionated long haired gray bearded professors. In essence it acknowledges the existence of other options but dispenses with their necessity directly and in a way that makes it seem the obvious decision, as though all tech development not software written by a friend of theirs was clearly a waste of time. No, worse than a waste of time, a vampiric trick that will waste your time.

I love it for being thorough and maintaining this patient attitude of complete dismissal

You just described his style perfectly. After listening to him justify things I always feel like that.

The vibe is "You can explore further, I will not"

> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program ... that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me.

Why stop there, when you can route them directly to a print queue, and have the message sent to you in a bottle.

You should save your comment to read it back in 10 years. With how things are going with software and hardware attestation, printing will probably not be possible since most sites will disallow reproduction of their media through unauthorized devices, and printing something means relinquishing the power to control and monitor where and for whom the content is displayed.

He's definitely at the far extreme. I'm glad there's someone out there... But I also wish FOSS in general was ,ore focused on typical use cases, it seems like a lot of OSS is done by and for people who mostly use computers to write text and process it.

The year of the Linux desktop keeps not really happening partly because hackers have very different interests and priorities from consumers.

> The year of the Linux desktop keeps not really happening partly because hackers have very different interests and priorities from consumers.

There is no year of the Linux desktop, and never will be. Consumers won't use it, because they have been trained to use other things that are widely available and that 98% satisfies their requirements.

If Linux was the only operating system, or the only choice between that and something very expensive, then you would see consumers starting to use it and companies showing up to sell them things that run on it.

As it happens, Linux approximates enough of the desktop experience to meet a certain baseline of usability, and that's all some people need.

That's mostly a side effect. Importantly it enables hackerly people to have most of the affordances of a desktop, as well as their cool esoteric software that enables them to do their niche wierd thing that they're super interested in and then publish a book about it using LaTeX or some convolution of MarkDown and tooling.

(and if that sounds critical in any way I do apologise: I love that linux exists and use it almost exclusively).

I use Linux almost exclusively too(Except for things I can use an Android tablet instead for, I really only use actual PCs for programming and media creation). But I often strongly consider switching to Windows, although cost and inertia stop me from actually trying it out.

I think there could be a year of the Linux desktop, and I would love it, but the current Linux community would hate it(As is, they hate most of the stuff I like about Linux, like DBus, The Init System We Only Name to start Flamewars, NetworkManager, etc.

FOSS in general just has way too high of a tolerance for problems. Users seem to see them as a normal part of the experience, rather than as things that are not supposed to happen on a modern system.

There's kind of a culture of "It's free, if you don't like it, fork it and fix it", but you can't actually do that yourself unless you've got years to spend to try to make something resemble commercial software, and there's not much interest.

I'm not sure how to solve the issue of FOSS being unappealing to most..

> I don't have time to play a game a long time try to get good at it. So I rarely play any game except quick forms of solitaire. Of course, any game I run on my computer must not include nonfree software.

> If the game runs on a server, [...] it should allow connection via Tor. Evidently it must not be a game which you win by fast reaction.

Some things never change, do they? We ought to rope him into a game of Quake with Carmack and Romero while they're all still around.

> A friend once asked me to watch a video with her that she was going to display on her computer using Netflix. I declined, saying that Netflix was such a threat to freedom that I could not treat it as anything but an enemy

The madlad. I love it.

I appreciate all that Stallman has done for computing and continues to fight the good fight

Posted on behalf of RMS:

Many of the postings here talk about my "support for open source." For instance, the first posting mentions my "insistence that all software should be open source." That is a misunderstanding, because what I advocate is the free software movement -- a different idea based on different values.

See https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html for an explanation of what free software and open source have in common, and where they differ. See fsf.org/tedx for a quick intro to the free software idea -- if you only know the open source idea, it may surprise you.

It seems he isn't a big fan of Python:

> When you start a Lisp system, it enters a read-eval-print loop. Most other languages have nothing comparable to `read', nothing comparable to `eval', and nothing comparable to `print'. What gaping deficiencies!

> I skimmed documentation of Python after people told me it was fundamentally similar to Lisp. My conclusion is that that is not so. `read', `eval', and `print' are all missing in Python.

Given he appreciates lisp, I'd like to know his opinions on the smalltalk family, that shares many of the same strengths. I never managed to find any declarations from him about it.

while 1: print(eval(input()))

Amazing

But seriously, ipython.

yea i really have no idea what he is talking about

it's sad when people are so confidently incorrect

It would be funny if rms didn't actually spend much time at a computer anymore, while maintaining a Free Software purist image. (I have no idea if that's reality, it's just an amusing thought)

It's pretty close to reality. Here's a video where he explains that he's "never installed ganoo-slash-linocks" or learned how, because he can always ask the IT department to do it for him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umQL37AC_YM

In a way, he's absolutely right, and why Apple and Microsoft have gone to great lengths to make installing an OS as easy as possible, something the OSS community misfired on for years, almost as a bizarre badge of pride. The average person shouldn't have to know how to take a car apart in order to drive it.

OpenBSD is the absolute worst at this, especially its disk partitioning obstacle course.

As always, there is an XKCD for that:

https://xkcd.com/349/

I like Stallman’s point that “computing” in the way that >99.9% people on earth do it is unethical. It’s a good reminder of what we’ve all lost by falling for trinkets like books and music on the computer

Tldr:

Tediously, like I'm stuck in the early 90s.

At last the Internet back then was not the siloed dumpster fire of mass spying tech it later become.

Honestly, I think I prefer the internet in 1999 than today. We had Amazon when it was good, google when it was good, eBay when it was good, cheap web hosting, plentiful linux, etc etc

I hope we get back to simple services that worked rather than lock-in machines trying to extract maximum revenue in an enshittification spiral.

What a pity.

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