I'm trying to figure out what they are selling me, or what megacorp they are associated with, but I don't see it yet.
126 karma · joined July 4, 2022
I'm trying to figure out what they are selling me, or what megacorp they are associated with, but I don't see it yet.
I'm reminded of Wendell Berry's essay "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer"[1]:
> I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.
This essay was apparently written in 1987. If Mr. Berry were to revisit the subject today, I suspect he would offer much the same sentiment, perhaps even more strongly.
> The last thing the world needs is more software.
My dream job in this field is to get paid to delete code.
[1] https://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/philtech/be...
The problem is supporting unbuffered I/O (`cat -u`). Standard C simply can't do it. setvbuf(3) allows you to change the buffering on an I/O stream, but then fread(3) only allows you to read exact-sized blocks of data. You can only get a short read on EOF or error. So there is no way to say "give me as much data as is available, up to X amount of bytes" and therefore no way to implement unbuffered cat(1) efficiently using only ISO C. You need POSIX for that.
I looked to see what Chuck Moore was up to; he's in his 80s and still tinkering and chatting with fans of his work, as recently as late last year: