pretoriusB

>Supporting a monoculture is trading future potential in the name of short-term convenience.

By supporting lots of rendering engines to do the exact same thing in various degrees of brokeness we haven't seen any "future potential" and we also lost the short-term convenience.

>Wishing you could wave a magic wand and make everyone use the same tools, language, conventions, or coding style is something every engineer wishes from time to time, but the world would be worse off without diversity.

I'm not sure. I see a lot of examples where diversity has fucked things up:

1) Linux fragmentation for example killed it as a platform for proprietary apps, 2) Gnome/KDE/... fragmentation killed the Linux desktop mass adoption, 3) Tons of C++ compilers make cross platform C++ code more difficult (it's a little better nowadays)

I also see many examples where lack of diversity has made things better:

1) Ruby web frameworks? 99% of the people go with Rails, and it gets all the improvements and stuff (compare with Java/PHP web frameworks).

2) Mobile rendering engine? 99% of companies go with Webkit and free lots of their resources up plus contribute to the betterment of the project.

>But the moment we start treating the Web as a zero-sum game and stop collaborating on the vision of a better online experience, nobody wins.

How about solving the "collaborating" problem by working on the same engine?

>Do you really think complete control over another human being is morally acceptable, even if it prevents that person from becoming a drug addict?

Do you really think a complex political system like in a former socialist country, can be reduced to "complete control over another human being"?

>Impossible to memorize? I wrote all these examples from memory.

Yes. And people can site Pi to the 10.000 digit. Doesn't make it any less useless.

>I took every single example from your README, and show you below how everything can be reimplemented with sed -r (nice extended regex syntax, mostly like js regexs), and find/xargs:

And why assume a POSIX command line?

Wow.

From this list of issues some of which are "fixed at 4.x", and from the fact that --based on Google's own stats-- very few people have 4.x (only around 10% of all Android devices have it or have upgraded to it), the whole Android vs iOS fight seems kind of moot. Technology wise iOS wins hands down.

People don't just come in when you can serve more of them.

McDonalds are working with a certain flow of customers mostly based on location, time, etc, not on "ability to serve".

Now, if they start throwing people off because they are just too many to serve, that's another thing...

>Polls suggest there is a real yearning in some areas to go back to the days where the secret police and rationing of basic goods were real things. It's bizarre.

Not very bizarre. Other things were also "real things", like job security, food for everyone (even if little), a sense of belonging, etc. And a far better culture (including a vibrant counter-culture against the regime) than the BS that the media serve today.

If you visit some places full of dirt poor families, abandoned buildings and meth addicts, you'll get a nice glimpse why some might want it another way.

Well, any pointers? Because, I for one, question it.

Most of the account sounds overblown (and specially crafted in the model of 1984, Nazi camps and such).

Any corroboration for this story? Because "escaped" people are known to say anything, especially since it can be very profitable outside their country.

For one, people like and buys survival stories (the harder the better), second, if they are nicely crafted they can serve as diplomatic pressure and propaganda (which is not the sole province of North Korea).

So, any actual evidence, outside what just one man says that we are supposed to take for granted?

>What's stopping North Korea from making these demands?

That they are an actual country, and not some comic book villain's brotherhood?

I mean, WTF? People in the West really believe those kind of things can be demands or that those kind of BS passes through North Korean people's minds?

>From this, I understood that in a larger program, most programmers wouldn't be doing the kind of micro-optimizations that they do for the Benchmarks Game.

The TL;DR; is wrong too. It doesn't require micro-optimizations for a large real world C program to be faster than an equivalent Haskell program.

All those abstractions and laziness in Haskell add up, and you get lower performance overall compared to ANY decent C implementation of a real world program, not just "highly optimized" ones.

>It doesn't seem like you are really in disagreement.

Oh, I'm very, very much in disagreement.

It's not just about "preference" as if preference is arbitrary.

Superficial syntactic preference IS arbitrary.

Substancial syntax issues are not.

Brainfuck is not just left alone because people don't "prefer" its syntax. That's reading it in reverse. People don't prefer Brainfuck's syntax because it is objectively, and for reasons related to human psychology, cognition, etc bad.

E.g it makes it measurably difficult to discern different program states.

>Stop right there. Before colonization those lands were dominated by the ottoman empire, which exported "black gold" from there. By which I mean that they'd ride into the villages on horseback, kidnap the young into slavery, to be exported into North Africa, the Middle East or Asia. Similar things happened in India. They left the old or infirm to die of hunger and thirst, wounded and alone. Coming out of ottoman domination, the indigenous population was literally worse off than in the stone age.

My country was a subject of Ottoman domination. The Islamic world was far more progressive a lot before the Ottoman rule you mention. And even the ottoman domination, cruel as it was, was nothing like the colonial situation. Only white people, and far away from there, would ever think it was any better.

>In the 6 cities in Congo that I visited that were colonized after WWI, the older generation says that the current situation is worse than colonization. In places where the old wars have resumed, like near the Sudan border, it is much worse.

The current situation is not the old situation. It's the post-colonial situation, and colonialism (and subsequent interventions) is what shaped the current mess.

Like the bloody divisions the British Empire ensured they left behind wherever they left (Israel/Palestine, Ethiopia/Erithraia, Cyprus/Nothern Cyprus, India/Pakistan, etc).

Congo, for one, was no actual country, with history, sovereignity etc. It was a claimed property by Europeans in Africa, that was made into a country. They drew their plot on the map and took over, not caring about what tribes it contained, what the local tensions were, etc. Of course the resulting country would have a problem after they leave.

It would be like an invader coming and making a "country" out of Texas and part of southern Mexico. He rules with iron fist (and guns and tons of blood) and keeps things stable. What will happen when he leaves? Are the Texans and the Mexicans going to enjoy peace in that BS "country" he designed, or fight for control?

(And colonials don't just leave: they appoint their own guys long after they are gone. Here's an example: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/inside-france... )

>That's bullshit anti-Western propaganda.

You don't get to have colonies all other the world, exploit people, invade their countries, have millions of black slaves, and then dimiss the effects of this as "anti-Western propaganda".

>Those "poor peoples" as you call them are responsible for their own fates, just as all of us are, no matter the situation we're born into. They have to take control of their own destiny.

Easy for the 200-pound armed-to-the-gills bully that keeps them down to say that. But yes, it would be nice if they managed to get control of their own destiny and pay back some justice. Like take 20-30 million white western people to use as slaves in their fields.

>Overly dramatic sensationalism - ripped straight from a first year college pamphlet on how to be angry at the man - at its best.

No, actually pretty much pragmatic and casual. That's how the work works (at least as it is).

Unlike your ad-hominen attack, which was childish ("oh, a stereotypical fake college revolutionary", etc).

>And all it warrants is a simple: prove it. Such an extraordinary claim, you should do it the justice of demonstrating it as fact.

Nothing extraordinary about it.

And you even missed the example I gave. Here are a few other examples, barely scratching the most obvious facts:

(1) Large part of the Southern US GDP was for centuries based on slave labour. Today's fortunes, nicely paved streets, etc.

(2) The wealth of European societies has been subsidized from 1500 to 1950 from colonies and occupated land all over the third world.

(3) If you have a home anywhere in the US, is because some people back in the day took the land of previous inhabitants.

(4) Cheap oil in the West depends on military and political pressure (instead of open market exchange) from toppling Iran's elected government back in the day to invading Iraq et al.

>Precisely. The whole "my language is better" argument is completely void. Syntax is mostly a matter of preference. Semantic will make the structure of your program different but in the end there is no actual difference on what you can do only on how you will do it.

That is extraordinarily wrong.

Syntax:

1) affects the structure of a program,

2) affects how we think about it,

3) affects what is easy to do and what is not,

4) adds or removes mental strain on reasoning about the program,

5) forbids or enables certain kinds of errors.

And much more.

The idea that syntax doesn't matter and is "a matter of preference" is completely bogus. The human mind has certain limitations and capabilities. Some syntaxes cater to that, some do not.

No one using Brainfuck will never be as productive as Python, to take an extreme case.

>If people treated C++ as a maintenance-only language and used it only for legacy code -- like COBOL -- the world would be a better place. The world would also save billions of dollars.

Citation needed. This is a wishful thinking idea that ignores tons of pragmatics in application development.

Not that irrational.

Lots of filesystems slow down with tons of files on the same folder.

And your window manager has to draw all their icons and potentially render (and hopefully cache) previews when you see your Desktop, which is also costly.

I've seen OSs take their sweet time (4-10 seconds) to render all icons on a cluttered Desktop.

>This isn't a question that already doesn't have an answer. Researchers showed at the Common Cold Centre in London that body temperature has an impact on the likelihood of catching flu.

That research was far from conclusive or scientific.

>Religion and ignorance go a long way. You can't throw money to the problem

Those places have been far more tolerant before they had colonial overlords and post-colonial interventions. Islam in particular was nowhere as strict and even more progressive that the feudal European populations of the time (and developed math, poetry, etc).

(And it's not like the Bible Belt for example is a paradigm in the case of "religion and ignorance").

>Now try teaching people about safe sex and AIDS. Try teaching people about the importance of an education.

You cannot teach them in abstract. You have to build the foundations to teach them. And all the foundations that we took for granted in the western world have been either destroyed or not developed in the past in those countries.

Note also that when people say "try teaching people about the importance of an education", they mostly mean: try teaching people about WESTERN style education and western work ethic / values, etc.

So a tribe in Africa that lived perfectly fine in a relative balance, Amish style, for millennia, has the modern world (in the form of the colonial and post-colonial powers) invade in it's culture, their farmland or hunting places destroyed etc, and they are left to adapt to this new context or die. So they have to be "educated" to get some mind-numbing soul-crushing job as a factory worker, reject their culture, etc.

The same thing happens in Latin American tribes.

We adapted to the modern world by choice and by developing it (and over centuries at that). They are FORCED to "adapt to it or die, pronto". It's not at all the same.

>All of these "100 richest people" probably give away more than 100x what you earn in a year already. Are you honestly going to call them selfish?

Yes. Charity is a feel-good hypocrisy (or worse, just a tax saving measure).

Nobody made huge tons of money without other people's blood under it. And especially not the top 1%.

Even a record artist that makes money from his songs (so he doesn't hurt anyone personally) is taking advantage of a huge system of that makes possible the money his audience spends (e.g from the stealing of the native indian lands to the US invading other countries for cheap oil, to the domestic market taking advantage of sweatshop labour in third world --that the colonial powers have first razed--, etc).

>If you are, then you are saying everyone should give away as much of their "cakes" as possible. Can you afford to give away an extra "cake"? Probably. Then you are selfish too, by your own logic.

Maybe. But:

1) being selfish for your 1 extra cake and being selfish for 1,000,000 cakes is hugely different.

2) being selfish is a personal moral issue that is insignificant compared to the systemic problem of mass wealth accumulation.

>Dire poverty is self-inflicted.

Self-inflicted? That is a bullshit western justification. Those poor peoples have been milked to extinction by colonial overlords and left do die.

Not to mention that their very countries were designed and drawn on the map by colonial powers, like dividing loot, with no respect to local populations and tensions (or with full intent to exploit them, in a "divide and conquer" move).

Or that even today the governments of those countries are appointed and remotely controlled by western powers, with everything from under the table deals to open military support for their cronies.

Calling poverty in those places "self-inflicted" is like saying a raped woman "deserved it".

So what? The annual income of the rest of the world is distributed among 7 billion people -- not 100 people.

So even if it could "end world poverty more than four times over" the amount per person gets negligible. You cannot get much from the already poor to give it to the already poor.

A better example would be the richest 10% of adults, which accounts for 85% of the world total assets (so the other 90% has just 1/5 what they have).

The thing is, just getting 1/4 of the property of the richest 100 persons could save hundreds of millions of lives and improve billions, while it would leave those 100 perfectly fine.

The reason we don't do it is because we value private property (especially of the rich) more than millions of human lives.

(We think nothing of overtaxing or working to the bone the poor on the other hand, or stealing their natural resources and land -- as centuries of colonialism has shown).

>But the changes in human societies that are commonly called "progress" are the result of purposeful decisions by individual human beings.

Purposeful doesn't translate to "progress" any more that "natural determination by the laws of physics" does.

>They tried to halt progress because they thought progress was taking their jobs and making their lives worse.

They didn't just "thought it". The experienced it objectively. They were out of a job.

>And if we gave in to that sort of extremely short-sighted and regressive view then we'd be no better off today than we were 200 years ago.

It depends. The unemployed guy fired because of automation would be better off.

>Not so, Bell labs was a special place at the time and provided significant advantages (like access to computers for one). If the likes of Thompson and Ritchie came about 15 years later where they could develop Unix independently and the aforementioned advantages had melted away, why wouldn't they? At that point AT&T would offer nothing but constraints.

I call BS. People also do stuff for the mere fun of it, especially geeks.

For example Thompson and Ritchie had no problem developing Plan 9 for Lucent (AT & T) "15 years later" after the "advantages had melted away".

Not to mention that the example of advantage you provide ("access to computers for one") is insignificant in any case. Thompson and Ritchie could get work anywhere they wanted with computers available. At least the other commenter meant huge deals of money by "advantage", not standard job perks.

>200 years ago, the Luddites tried to stop technological progress. They didn’t succeed.

The luddites could not care less about technological progress, succeeding or not.

What they tried to do is keep their jobs to be able to feed their families. And, yes, they failed at that.

The message of the luddites is not to abolish technology: it's too think of the human costs behind progress, not just the benefits for the factory owner or "future generations".

>The overwhelming majority of vim/emacs developers use it in a terminal, and are pretty happy with it. When you mentioned open source editors catching up, it isn't going to happen because your requirements are not universal. "Only if it looked shiny" is very low on todo list of vim/emacs users/developers.

Way to fuck up the discussion in a disingenuous and insulting way by summing down my arguments to "I like shiny things".

I specifically talked about native integration. That has myriads of aspects, of which "oh, shiny" is just an insignificant part of.

As for the "overwhelming majority of vim/emacs" users using them in the terminal, citation needed.

My anecdotal data tell me that they use them in both in both terminal and GUI form (terminal for working on stuff remotely, admin stuff etc, GUI for long term programming sessions).

Plus, no matter what the "overwhelming majority of vim/emacs" do, those do not represent the future or cutting edge of programming editor use in any conceivable way. And that is precisely what we are discussing.

>bad support for Unicode >>My terminal(terminator) does that fine.

Does that answer mean that you don't have the mental capacity to follow the discussion? Maybe you're too tired or something?

Isn't it obvious from my comment that I mean Unicode support THROUGHOUT the system? That one or ten terminals has got it doesn't mean a thing if there are 200 other components involved in doing unicode CLI work. For example GNU/BSD unix userland programs supporting full unicode capabilities. Unicode and font-rendering without X-running, etc etc.

>Why and how would a terminal support JSON? What are those ad-hoc desktop things?

What is this stupid notion that I talk about terminal emulators ONLY? I specifically bloody state that I complain about all terminal-side stuff "from terminal emulators to userland unix commands".

In this case, what I ask for (when giving JSON as an example) is a structured way of communication between userland commands, to go beyond '70s style pipes. Microsoft's Powershell AFAIK has some of that built-in.

>shell has to support autocomplete in million things, compared to your native app which only does one thing say Java.

You'd be surprised. And context-sensitive autocomplete is so solved that it's not even a problem...

>You install some utility shit_load. How on earth is shell going to complete "shit_load -<TAB>".

See how luck of imagination and blind acceptance of what's there cripples programmers?

Off the top of my head: programs could come with definition files for their autocompletion. Adding a program adds those to your shell (in the same way programs come with man-pages).

I seriously hope you don't work in R&D.

>tmux/screen scroll buffers work fine. You are just making shit up.

Only if "switching in copy-mode to scroll, instead of transparently incorporating the terminal scroll buffer" fits your definition of "fine".

So, I assume you have considered all the aspects of the problem to come to that conclusion right?

Not merely pondered upon it for 2 minutes and decided that Apple programmers were idiots for doing so, right?

>What I'm trying to say is that Orkut was less passonate about it and had his creativity and motivation stifled compared to Mark. Mark obsessed over his project and had everything to gain. Orkut on the other hand - What advantage was there for him in building his project from within Google? None. And not much to gain, just a promotion.

You can be very much obsessed even in building something within Google. Obsession and passion are not measured in money.

By your logic the creators of Unix weren't obsessed with it, because "what did they have to gain (from AT&T)? Just a promotion".

I'd say being passionate in the specific thing we're discussing (Facebook vs Orkut) doesn't mean a thing. What exactly that more advanced Mark HAD to show for his passion? Yes, he has the far far better business now, but where was the passion factor at play in making a better offering THEN?

What I see is business opportunities and mistakes in Orkut vs Facebook.

Not any engineering (or other) passion that resulted in a visibly better product.