parallelist

Get a ThinkPad

Sounds a lot like censorship to me. It's discrimination at the very least.

Yeah I agree with this. From a standpoint of access to the minds of more human beings you can’t justify Esperanto when there are things like Spanish and Mandarin you could learn.

Lojban is for thinking unambiguously and more logically. It's good for programmers but also exactly the kind of language that an artist or poet wouldn't want to learn.

The Internet broke the whole idea of charging for a digital copy of something. We’re seeing a struggle of powers as old power tries to cling on to the idea of charging people for digital copies but it will end sooner or later. One needs to think outside the box of capitalism being an appropriate system for all aspects of society.

Talk about this kind of journalism out of context (why you don’t trust a particular study, for instance) and you’ll be called a quack or conspiracy theorist.

2. Identify and pursue collaborative opportunities

Number of things written in a language isn’t really a good measure for its quality. There was a time when most things were written in COBOL or assembly. I think the main reason people write so much BASH is because there by default.

What’s wrong with OCaml?

Perhaps we could use a similar law for software that says you have to opt-in for that. If you try to install Adobe Reader on a Windows PC, for instance, you have to untick to install the Ask! toolbar. I don’t like that

I’m really interested to know if that would stand up in court

Thank you

People still care about this? I thought JS was just an accepted requirement of browsing the web these days.

Out of interest how does your wiki integrate with your workflow? Or, in other words, what do you use it for?

Yep same here. org-mode FTW! You can use it as a personal wiki only able to keep all your data in plain text: no web server or database required. I still use filesystem as my primary organization so I only use hyperlinks occasionally. I put the whole load in dropbox so I can access any of it from my phone.

> Since "$" is used by CSS preprocessors for variables that work in a different way

A complete perversion of priorities. CSS generator languages change and go in and out of fashion all the time but CSS itself will be around for a very long time. They should make the best decision for the future of CSS. Generator languages are inevitably going to need to change to take advantage of any new feature anyway.

Firefox has too many bugs and when you file them they don‘t get fixed very quickly at all. That’s why it isn’t my primary browser. Maybe something about that should be in this document.

I like this post for many reasons. One of them is introducing me to the word retrogrouch

Are you a good programmer in imperative languages only by any chance?

I don’t see how you have inferred a fat controller and skinny model from my description. In fact I use the terminology of interfacing to describe what others here have interrupted back into MVC terms as a controller. That should be an indication as to the extent of its role i.e. not that large

My action layer is definitely fatter than the usual model because it does all the real work (that which persists) associated with a particular request. You could argue it is equivalent to involving several of the traditional models. I think it might also be fair to state that this represent an absence of architecture in that particular area and I would agree but there is nothing to suggest that you couldn’t create models with the action layer if you felt it was useful. Strictly speaking I’m against that sort of thing until I see a good case in front of me why I should do it. Writing queries is not so bad that I want to put something in front of it to automate it

Oh, I’ve just realized another difference. The model, as I refer to it is different from that in MVC. In MVC the model is usually a representation of database tables or "an interface defining the data to be displayed or otherwise acted upon in the user interface" (WikiP). For me it is the bit that preforms whatever work the user requested. So it’s pretty misleading of me to call it the model really because I’m not really all that concerned with modelling anything, I shall refer to it as the action layer from now on, I think

Interesting point. I’m not familiar with MVP but I guess I associate MVC with OO which I’m so over. I don’t see MVC as a pipeline of values but just kind of a way of vaguely separating things out and one that is easily and often corrupted. By contrast this would as pure (as in functions) as possible so each layer would communicate with each other layer exactly once for each request. I guess the principles are largely the same I’m just trying to do it with more rigor

I was thinking a scripting language really: JavaScript/CoffeeScript/TypeScript (presumably using Node), Lua, Python, etc. Even PHP is acceptable because I have evolved a particular style in that language that I find makes it significantly less unpleasant than most would imagine

I’m not completely against Clojure. I tried it for a couple of weeks many years ago and found it kind of difficult somehow. I’ve done a reasonable bit of Haskell since so it would probably be better now. My first choice for a lisp would be Racket. I’m not saying no, we’d have to discuss it more I think. Isn’t the big justification for Clojure the Java libraries?

Are you respected? Because I’d say don’t even bother trying if they don’t respect you

> Then, all of a sudden, the fog suddenly parted and it was like being set free. After that, I never had another Rails problem that I couldn't handle.

Pfftt, yeah sure. Everything is perfect in Rails land

On http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html Gabriel talks about the difficulty he had in deciding whether worse really is better and that he wrote various documents taking opposing positions

I find the worse entirely accurate.

This is a classic piece of programmer lore that goes a long way to describing why the software industry is the way it is today i.e. why everything sucks so much. My only criticism I have of it is that he mischaracterizes the-right-thing as being monolithically designed and slow performing (towards the end of the page). The-right-thing to me is always functionally and computationally superior, it just takes longer to make.

Can’t believe how long this list is. Would be great to have some kind of maturity rating system for each item.

Anyone got any solutions for cabal hell? I barely use Haskell because 50%+ of everything I try to install fails and I don’t have a freaking clue how to fix it.

Nothing useful said for:

  for word in foo bar baz; do echo $word; done

Seems to think COLUMNS is a command in:

  COLUMNS=20 ls

If the few bytes saved by this new domain seems worth commenting on what about the very large number of unnecessary whitespace characters they are serving?