Hacker News Reader

Why would you have such an opinion ? I can turn the problem in my head a thousand times, i still can't see why.

I'd guess that Ben is basing this on decades of exposure to papers published, work done, and books published by Pike and Thompson. He then compares this to the many other programming language researchers with whom he has personal and professional familiarity, and offers his opinion on their relative abilities. He's not arguing 'in principle', he's stating his personal assessment of these particular individuals.

Exactly. There is no shortage of material to decide on. From articles like http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html, to books like The Practice of Programming, to software like Unix and UTF-8, the invention of UTF-8, with many books in between, their abilities and accomplishments are obvious. There is also no shortage of articles like http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/bea... written by people whose opinions I respect, lauding their abilities.

By contrast I have no reason to believe that the average programming language researcher is smarter than the average CS prof. It would be astounding if this average was anywhere near Pike and Thompson.

I, in turn, have no reason to believe that the average systems programmer is smarter than Robin Milner or Guy Steele. So what?

It is pointless to even discuss averages in populations where only a handful of people at the top matter.

Checking golang a bit, I didn't feel it was "aiming for the path of least resistance". For instance, blocking compilation if any imported module is unused or forbidding circular dependencies, is going against the "let's let the coders do what they want".

I am currently involved in refactoring a big Python code base and I oh-so regret Python (which I like very much) is so easy-going on these issues.

Flake8 detects unused imports and generally adds some rigor that Python otherwise lacks. Not perfect, but it has made Python more pleasant for me for larger code bases especially.

Unix isn't the most used software, but it is probably the best. I think the makers of unix bring with them a strong sense of pedigree, but also something of a expectation that it shares unix design principles. Not sure if it does this or not, but the baggage is there.

UNIX is the "least crappy so far". There are probably better ways to do things, but we don't know them yet.

Oh, we do, e.g. Plan 9, but that doesn't mean the better ways can overcome the popularity of the incumbent that's "good enough".

I believe this is traditionally where the smug LISP weenies descend.

trap door creaks open, a Symbolics Genera machine running Zmacs is behind codewright

You raaaang?

That wasn't what he said, though.

I agree that they are among the smartest people for the job and that is why I am so surprised (and annoyed) that they choose tabs over spaces.

If for no other reason than that I have to have a different .vimrc file for my go programs than literally everything else.

Perhaps they're right and you're wrong?

Tabs are used for tabulating stuff. Spaces are used for spacing stuff. Indentation is a form of tabulation, so use tabs. Similarly to when you use a word processor, do you hold space down for long enough to center your text or do you use the "center" alignment? Right tools for the right job.

Hell it's not exactly hard to fix in vim either - just load the provided vim extensions as per the instructions and it just works without screwing up the rest of your configuration.

The amount of time I've had to spend dredging through fucked up merges where someone has added 5 or 3 spaces to the start of the line instead of 4 gives credence to why you should use tabs as the tab means "indented one level" rather than "n spaces depending on how the user or editor fucked up the file".

Anyway, rant over - sorry.

tabs mean you and i can vary in how our editor displays the text -- this is the simplest form of separation of style from content.

Lucky for you, they wrote a ftplugin for you.