wonderzombie

Whether you like it or not, you derive innumerable tangible benefits from living in American society, in no small part because generations before you paid for it. You're probably white, male, hetero, relatively young, and relatively healthy, and none of the advantages which accrued to you because of that are due to your life choices. Arguably, you have the sense of entitlement exactly backwards.

Long story short, some people question the idea that people who are successful deserve what they have merely because they have it, and that those who do are unsuccessful deserve to be poor because, in a word, they're meritless. Furthermore, some people want society at large to acknowledge the role chance and circumstance play in whether or not someone is successful.

Your last complaint is so old it's a cliche.

Contrariwise people are sick of being told they're "meritless" because of circumstances beyond their control-- the deck is stacked against you if you happen to fall into one of many less-than-fortunate categories.

While it might have been awesome at the time (I loved Ultima IV) I'm not a kid anymore. I don't have summer vacation. I also don't have ADHD. What I do have is an hour a day to play a game before bed, so that game damn well better make it worth my while.

Besides, the consistent popularity of MMOs and particularly MOBAs belies the whole idea of ADHD as driving factor. Both reward a large investment of time & mastery. And both are practically PC-only.

First, Vim emulation widgets vary a great deal in quality, supporting different, disjoint subsets of Vim functionality. Just as an example, ideaVim doesn't support Ctrl-W for navigating between panes. The deeper your knowledge of Vim, the more diminishing returns you get.

Second, Sublime Text's Vintage mode supports enough of my Vim workflow that it's actually made me faster with Vim and other Vim emulation widgets. To the extent that any Vim emulation mode overlaps with Vim, I have improved across the board. Of course this is true mostly for the less deep features IME.

Sublime Text did almost all I wanted out of the box. Maybe it has more functionality than I need, but it won hands down in terms of installing (and maintaining) software in order for it to be usable for me.

FWIW, since I abandoned Vim as my main editor, I just grab spf13-vim[0] when I want to use it. It's still really handy to be able to type vi foo to edit a file at the command line.

[0]: http://vim.spf13.com/

Just take it for what it is. It's one act of kindness. Buying a sandwich for a homeless person doesn't mean every homeless person is now entitled to a sandwich from you.

But this isn't a productive framing.

As much as we wish presidential administrations could make or break the economy -- it makes partisan sense, and it makes us think at least someone could run the show if they got their shit together -- it just isn't so. The current recession has its roots going much farther back than 2008. Depending on how you reckon, someone who's now 27 was either not yet conceived or in diapers when the bubble began inflating.

Likewise no amount of perseverance, hard work, temerity, gumption, or whatever the hell you want to call it, can wish the economy back to the '90s.

But the meta-reason is: if someone thinks they can get away with it, why wouldn't they do it? With that presumption you could even argue it's the rational choice. If you do it subtly, there's plenty of room for doubt. Furthermore, there are enough people who're invested for ideological reasons that, in the absence of strong evidence, all most people will hear is a lot of he-said, she-said.

More to the point, factor in any monetary investment in the scheme -- the prospect of collapse should a critical mass reach the same conclusion, for instance -- and the people who've invested have an incentive to stay the course. That incentive to maintain a good reputation cuts both ways. Reputation is a matter of popular perception.

Of course a complex language can be used to write simple code and vice versa. Ultimately every program is going to increase in complexity-- that quote about failure vs legacy nightmare applies here.

IMHO it's better to reduce the complexity of the language to a minimum so that language/runtime complexity doesn't have a multiplicative effect on application code complexity.

For instance, C++ is a complex language. That complexity inevitably accrues to applications written in C++. This is a conscious trade-off of the language -- performance + high level programming, or what have you.

In the end, though, I am not sure I'd argue there's much correlation between simplicity of the language and simplicity of the code. It's too hard to get anyone to agree on what simple means anyway. Me, I prefer Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" for that, but not everyone agrees.

ETA: I guess what I would say is: would you prefer to start with something simpler and build complexity appropriate to the problem domain out of simple, but sound ideas? Or would you prefer to start with a set of inherently complex primitives and build something else complex on top of that? It's subjective, but I've probably leaked my bias in the phrasing.

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

That's reductive. Not everyone has the bandwidth to sort through every iota of evidence. And the fact is that there's no shortage of people who have little in arguing in good faith. So people resort to heuristics such as reputation, credibility, what other "reputable" people say, etc.

Korean was kind of revelatory for me. Maybe I don't know what all the words mean, but being able to sound them out Hangul is far more rewarding than it ought to be.

The other, other part is speaking idiomatically. There are a ton of idioms.

Don't forget about measure words, either. :)

I think you can make yourself understood easily enough, as I could chat a bit with Chinese coworkers or waitresses. But I suspect to truly master it, it's a lot harder than a language (e.g.) with an alphabet.

Is there something in particular you're having a hard time with, out of curiosity? I don't consider myself particularly brilliant but I didn't have a year's worth of trouble with Clojure.

As far as Lisp's syntax itself, the lack of special cases means there's less to learn. Myself, I like some of the sugar you get in Clojure for hashes, vectors, sets, etc.

As for macros themselves, ostensibly you don't need to know the implementation details of every macro any more than you need to understand what executing a Java method does in terms of JVM bytecode. In practice sometimes you'll goof up and try to map a macro over a list. Depending on your Lisp implementation, the mistake should be obvious. And depending on your editor, it may even highlight some or all macros differently.

Also, Racket also has a different approach than some of the Lisp reader manipulation you see in Common Lisp. We're getting outside my familiarity here though.

I agree that the consequences should be modulated. I've said elsewhere that death threats are unacceptable, but this is an unsolved problem in society at large. It's not unique to Eich's situation.

Other than that, the consequences are rather mild for someone with as deep a resume as Eich's. I'm sure we'll hear about it if he's been blackballed from the entire industry, or someone sabotages a new company of his, or what have you. I suppose it could happen but I think it unlikely.

Likewise, aside from behavior that I'm sure we both agree ought never happen, it's hard for me to find fault with people exercising their own right to criticism & browser choice. It's certainly not the moral equivalent of a mob threatening his physical well-being, and a (forced) resignation isn't morally equivalent to being thrust into the wilderness with nothing but the clothes in your back.

You're saying we should ostensibly set the standard higher the bare minimum of legality, and that's fair. I just don't see this situation as being a dangerous precedent in this context. If you not in so many words argue that a bunch of your citizens are subhuman, a backlash is inevitable, particularly when it's based on so flimsy a premise. The case for responsible speech goes both ways.

The "insult your boss" example was just a trivial example of how freedom of speech still entails a responsibility for the consequences-- it is not an absolute and inviolate for a variety of good reasons, though a great many commenters here wish it were.

As it stands now, having a job is not a human right. I think maybe it should be! But it's not. There's not even a right to a living wage in the US. There's certainly no right to be a CEO of Mozilla enshrined anywhere, and I believe CA is an at-will employer. So.

Maybe if he's blackballed from the entire industry, I'll characterize that as oppressive. But this is one job at one company. He's lost one (1) job. It may be unjust but life is hard when you have views the public finds objectionable. I can't imagine a system under which this would not be so.

Anyway, I'm not sure what alternative you envision here. Should people have just sucked it up? Expressed criticism more politely? Your premise precludes you from policing others' speech. I'm just not sure how you square others' freedom when it comes to disagreeing with the company's decision to hire an avowed bigot.

The analogy to socialism is vastly overstating the problem, and a cheeky way to deny Eich's critics' freedom of criticism. A sincerely held belief is not a shield against criticism, and free speech isn't absolute. It never has been.

The fact is that free speech means people are free to disagree en masse when they find a view abhorrent. A pro-slavery, misogynist, racist, or anti-interracial-marriage individual has a right to their views. They don't have a right to avoid social censure when their views are beyond the pale. And that's exactly what happened here.

Now, if he got blackballed across the industry, I'd be there with you. But that's not a foregone conclusion by any means.

I don't understand what you mean by slander. Go look at the interviews he gave. If his views in 2014 are any different from his views in 2008, he gave no indication whatsoever. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Compare and contrast how the CEO of OkCupid handled a similar situation, having donated $500 to an anti-choice, anti-gay candidate in '04. He apologized publicly and stated unequivocally that he believes marriage is a civil right.

This was not a "gotcha." Eich held the same views all along.

And who the heck are you to make such a blanket statement about who's productive and who isn't? It's a false dichotomy. Moreover your statement evokes an incredible amount of arrogance and hubris.

These things are not at all the same. And in this case, we're talking about a CEO, the public face of a company, not an otherwise private citizen.

For, those that believe otherwise, I'd say that their opinoon means that people who talked against slavery in 1840 and were fired, ostracized from their community or beaten up were also living in a "free speach" environment.

Should I put words in your mouth, about how we'd still be living with Jim Crow if you had your way? "Let's not offend anyone who's racist, lest they feel like their rights to bigotry are being undermined!" What I just wrote and what you wrote above are not productive.

It's also pretty rich to compare abolitionists -- people campaigning for an expansion of human rights -- to someone who did the exact opposite.

Anyway, you're essentially arguing that free speech means freedom from consequences, and it just doesn't. Free speech is not absolute, as has been demonstrated time and again.

You can't insult your boss to their face and expect to get away with it b/c free speech. Likewise you can't try to deny an entire class of people their rights and expect zero consequences b/c free speech. It's never worked that way.

There's no right to be a CEO, either. I wouldn't dispute a racist's right to speak as they like, but free speech doesn't mean turning a blind eye to bigotry and prejudice. Views are not somehow exempt from criticism just because they are sincerely held.