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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

if geoffrey james asks me to i'll take it down but i've had it online for i think 26 years and i don't think he minds

http://canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming

Your use of the ASCII character sequences `` and '' as substitutes for “ and ” are antiquated at best. It only looked good on old X11 fonts, and that was a misfeature of those fonts to begin with.

There is also many mistakes in your text: Where, in 1.1, your web page has “The user is pleased and there exists harmony in the world.”, my book (7th edition) has “The user is pleased and there is harmony in the world.” In 1.2, my book has “Each language expresses the yin and yang of software.”, but your text capitalizes: “Yin and Yang”. In the following paragraph, your text writes “COBOL”, but my book has “Cobol”. There are many more (including missing words, wrong words, etc.), but I don’t want to write them all here.

Buy the book.

Imagine haranguing someone on the internet for work they did nearly 30 years ago, and having the audacity to insist they change it.

Is simply reporting errors considered “haranguing” and “having the audacity to insist they change it”? Do you have the same attitude towards people who report bugs in your code?

it varies; sometimes people are being helpful by reporting bugs, for example because they don't know how to fix the bugs themselves, or because they're paying me to solve their problems so knowing what those problems are is the first step in getting paid, but sometimes they're just griefers looking for someone to bully

i suggest you fix the errors in your copy of the page and post the url here

> Your use of the ASCII character sequences `` and '' as substitutes for “ and ” are antiquated at best

30 year old thing does thing that was common 30 years ago.

You know the book uses outdated terminology and probably doesn't use colour.

I was not criticizing the book, I was criticizing the transcription on the web page. And a web page is continually published, so it is perfectly reasonable to expect it to be kept up to date enough to at least not look terrible on modern systems.

yeah, and i think it's really unfortunate that we ended up with unix aping the misguided font choices of microsoft windows on this point instead of microsoft windows adopting the superior choice previously made by unix

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