patrickg

While I agree to the use case / tiny arguments, it doesn't seem to work in practice. I am now using Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) to teach programming. Much better.

Teaching programming to my 8 year old is a burden, because everything is in English. Teaching two things at a time is more difficult than it has to be.

My database publishing system's programming language is both English and German. While programmers usually prefer the English interface, a rather large percentage of my users prefer the German one. (en: https://speedata.github.io/publisher/manual/index.html, de: https://speedata.github.io/publisher/manual/index-de.html)

There is also for example ConTeXt (http://wiki.contextgarden.net) - a typesetting language similar to LaTeX, which supports commands in English, Dutch and German.

NV and nvALT were such a gereat push in note taking. My first note is now five years old. Before that, I have used a plain text file for everything.

I really like the hyperlinks and full text search in nvALT.

I don't comment on the Kanzlerakte, it's obvious fake.

US barracks are not extraterritoriality zones, please cite your claim.

"US soldiers are not under German jurisdiction", this is only partly true. It's part of the "NATO-Truppenstatut". With Art. 19 Abs. 3 Satz 1 ZA (Zusatzabkommen) the foreign soldiers are part of German jurisdiction.

Again, please cite your claims.

Please give a reliable source for your claims.

We have peace now since more than a few decades. It doesn't need a signed peace treaty to have peace in a country.

The 2+4 contract has explicitly stopped the allied control.

Linked lists and arrays / slices are two totally different data structures with different applications: Removing objects from (anything but the end of) arrays / slices is expensive. If this is a common operation, linked list might be prefarable. This is not a language issue. At my day job, I manipulate lists a lot, this would not be faesable at all with arrays/slices.

Edit: this is a simplified, but typical example of my problem space: http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/233489/243 Traversing a list and manipulate the list entries by adding other items to the list.

Is the design of the playing cards open? I am always looking for nice demos for our open source database publishing software, which does handle cmyk + spotcolors etc. (https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html)

I can't answer the question but anyway:

None of my customers have ever asked for that. I have not seen a printing house that demands XPS. So I doubt that it plays any role in the market (Germany here).

Actually the XML part is the one that maps best to the problem space. I deal with structured documents (such as part/title/paragraph ... or product group/product/components). The database part (usually Excel sheets or SQL based stores) are the ones that are "insufficient".

I was a bit unclear. When I get database dumps, I get them as Excel files or as an XML document.

Most of the times the documents I get are hierarchically structured.

Yes, JSON could be fine as well. But it simply lacks a standard toolchain which XSLT ans its ilk proides.

I am not trying to defend XML in any way. I just want to say the two things:

a) my customers never deal with JSON, but often with XML, so JSON (and other formats) are not an issue for me b) There is a very nice toolchain for XML, including formatters, tranformation tools, database publishing tools (my very own: https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html) and many others. I have not found such a toolchain for other formats.

I am working for many years in the publishing business (dealing with structured documents, product data etc.). I can tell you, that all of my customers are more open XML than any other document formats (there exist none as suitable for the job).

You can call me clueless or dishonest, I don't care. I can only share my experience with the topic. You don't have to believe me.

apples and oranges? There is no other way of encoding structured documents these days than XML. Like it or not, XML is the de facto standard for data exchange (export from databases, product information software,....)

XML might be overengeneered (which, except for a few things I don't agree with), but there is currently no alternative for it.

+1 - I have to deal with structured documents encoded in XML on a daily base, and most of the time there is no other tool for me than to write an XSLT stylesheet.

I really like the computational model of XSLT (push vs. pull), it is so elegant. But it takes a quite some time to fully understand what is going on.

What I think is bad, is that the infrastructure for XSLT is not perferct. There is only one good XSLT 2 processor that I know of, everything else is XSLT 1.

I am currently eliminating some XSLT scripts with custom (Go) programs, because of speed issues.

I am glad that for Go there is `go fmt` which predefines some of the issues mentioned in the article. Thus there is "one global coding style for Go". It's another matter if one likes it or not.

Plus 100 for this. I've (after one year of business) open sourced my software and this was one of the better moves in my 5 years business history.

This opened a lot of doors for me.

I know some of the latex3 people, and I know they are working on it. It is not a frontend code (for example such thing as \tableofcontents), but currently purely backend stuff.

A lot of latex2e packages are using latex3 in the background (for example fontspec).

Not really an alternative to classic LaTeX (scientific articles, homework and college / university work) but for database publishing (XML -> PDF):

https://github.com/speedata/publisher

manual:

http://speedata.github.io/publisher/manual/index.html

built on top of (Lua)TeX.

Actually LaTeX was invented to be a typesetting DSL. As someone who has taught TeX and LaTeX and written my own software on top of TeX, I have come across this question very often. Basic TeX is not meant to be high level at all. LaTeX hides the complexity of 95% of the typesetting needs.

And I wonder what the author means with "more flexible than TeX". I have never seen (except for emacs) a more flexible software than TeX. Fully programmable (although the programming language is somewhat different than the commonly used ones). And with LuaTeX, you can even use Lua to program the system (like SILE) and you can use LuaTeX as a library to create your own frontend while using the power TeX gives (glue/box model, line breaking algorithm, ...)

Very limited audience? No marketing effort?

isn't itext released under the terms of the AGPL? While one may like or dislike the license, it should be considered OpenSource!?!

QPDF is great! I use it heavily to analyze PDFs generated from other applications (PDFTeX, InDesign) to incorporate new features (such as spot colors) in my software (http://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html) The command line I prefer is

    qpdf --qdf --object-streams=disable in.pdf out.pdf

so I can view the result with less or a text editor.

It's not really what I think would be appropriate, it's just a comparison of the length of sentences, which is totally different across legislatures. I've seen a TV report about Indonesia, where possessing drugs (if I understand it correctly) has extremley high sentences, comparable to murder here in Germany.

About fairness: I think the discussion is way out of scope of HN, and I think it's about what you expect from a law system in a country.

I don't understand your second question. You mean, what kind of sentences are life long sentences? Murder, high treason (?) (Hochverrat gegenüber dem Bund) can be given life long sentence, Sexual abuses against a child in which the child dies (and several other crimes where a person dies can be punished with life long sentence)

I am always astonished (not in the positive meaning) by the length of theses sentences. The maximum sentence in Germany is 15 years (except for a life long sentence for murder, which could be longer).

(disclaimer: I am a volunteer/part time judge)

Edit:

I'd like to add that I will not comment in public whether I think the sentence is appropriate or not, as I don't ever want anybody in a trial to accuse me of a biased opinion, although I highly doubt that anyone of "my" indicted people will ever read HN.

I travel a lot by train, which means a broken internet connection most of the time. Or when I stay in hotels or on a customer's site without wifi (3G doesn't always work well enough).

Licenses are to my knowledge always part of copying, not of executing. That is: you may download a game to your computer, if you've got the permission. But Steam cannot tell you that you are only allowed to run the game on wednesdays.

    "...but if you want to execute a compiled result of that source code I can still ask you to pay me for it."

morally: yes. Legally? I don't think that there is a law (German law is the one that I know a bit) that allows you restrict the usage of a piece of software.

No, it's a regular compiler (not jit). But anyway, you'd need to install Go, which, I'd guess, not everybody wants to do.