SimHacker

Look on the bright side: in this economy, many adults are getting divorced and moving back in with their parents. ;(

Perl 6 and Duke Nukem Forever are the geriatric poster children of vaporware, and always will be, even after they finally shipped. Being able to pick up a turd floating in a urinal does not in any way deliver on all the broken promises, rehabilitate the ruined reputation, or make up for all the blustering hype that was spewed for so many years about how superior Duke Nukem Forever's gameplay would be to all the other games that were already on the market. The damage was done a long time ago, and can never be undone. And Perl 6 is perfectly analogous to Duke Nukem Forever. Fortunately, nobody ever made such ridiculous claims about Python 3 as were made about Duke Nukem Forever and Perl 6.

This depressing problem requires a crazy solution. Rewrite Python 3 in JavaScript so it runs on V8, and can interoperate with JS code. ;)

The more important question of whether or not systems like C++ and X-Windows cause actual permanent brain damage in humans, will have to wait for the autopsies of human brain doners. That won't be soon, since they're still only in the animal experimentation stages. But I think it's reprehensible how they're exposing all those poor innocent bunnies to shoddy static class libraries without garbage collection, and high doses of raw Motif.

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/quotations.html

In his '90 Usenix presentation, Dennis Ritchie reminded the audience that Steve Jobs stood at the same podium a few years back and announced that X-windows was brain-dead and would soon die. "He was half-right. Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks."

-- Dennis Ritchie, coinventor of UNIX, from an article in UNIX Today

http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/1332...

We all get it that you think very highly of yourself, and belittling Glenn without actually having listened to his talk reinforces your feeling of superiority, but we don't care, so why don't you keep it to yourself?

When you're irrational and superstitious, it's easy to believe you're down on your luck, when actually it's not luck. You're down on the consequences of your own actions. Luck has nothing to do with it.

So do you actually think that climate change denial and the rejection of evolution is not correlated with religious believe, or membership in the Republican party?

You certainly are blind to how ridiculous your own superstitious religious beliefs are, even though you can clearly see that people who don't believe your religion are wrong. Has it ever occurred to you that your religion is just as foolish as all the rest? You should stop taking yourself and your superstitions so seriously. Just because your cult has a lot of members, doesn't mean it isn't a cult.

Most religions frown on bottomless greed and exploiting and persecuting the poor instead of helping them, but look at how Rush Limbaugh, leader of the Republican Party, hates the Pope for spreading the word of Jesus.

If you think elisp is bad, you never tried Mocklisp in Gosling/UniPress emacs.

The wrong people have been drunkenly driving Emacs into the ditch for the past decade or so, and they're really screwed it up in so many ways, usually trying to be way too clever and solve problems that really aren't worth solving.

They made "line-move-visual" the default, which in the service of making Emacs behave more like Microsoft Word, it makes ^N and ^P across wrapped lines stay on the same line and move to the part of the same line that is wrapped above or below the cursor, totally breaking type-ahead predictability and keyboard macros. That totally pissed of the late and long time Emacs user Marc Crispin, and he explains why it's such a terrible idea that breaks keyboard macros: http://compgroups.net/comp.emacs/line-move-visual/274792

It totally breaks keyboard macros, one of the most important things about Emacs. It definitely should not have been made the default, since keyboard macros are a way of life for real emacs hackers. I totally agree with Marc's take on the problem, and I am terribly disappointed that RMS let somebody get away with changing it that way, and making that horrible mode the default.

They just can't stop trying to make it more like Microsoft Word, while failing to actually achieve that goal, and only succeeding in inflicting half-assed solutions with harmful unpredictable side-effects on the users.

Another example is how the region highlighting and the weird pending delete behavior terrorizes me that sometimes but not all the time according to rules I just can't figure out or tell by looking at the screen, when I type something that I intend to insert, a huge chunk of my buffer might just disappear, but sometimes it doesn't. So now Emacs has become unpredictable and malicious. I have to do a dance of "insert character, undo" to know that I have canceled the pending delete mode. You can't tell if you are in pending delete mode just by looking at the screen and seeing the obnoxious highlighting, because sometimes it highlights the region and isn't in pending delete mode, and sometimes it highlights the region and is in pending delete mode. I just wish it would stop highlighting the region, because any time I set a mark and move around, it highlights half of the screen at no use to me, and that just gives me a headache, and I have to insert a character an undo it to cancel the highlighting, and until I cancel the highlighting I am living in terror that my next keystroke will delete a huge unseen portion of the buffer.

And the thing that REALLY pisses me off is the lame-assed attempt to make ^A and ^E ignore the prompt in shell mode. There is an extremely simple reliable solution to the problem of separating the prompt from your input in shell mode so you can always get to the beginning of the line with ^A, and that is to have a newline at the end of your prompt, so every line you type in is on the whole line and does not have a prompt prefix, therefore no half-assed magic is necessary.

But the half-asses magic is terribly implemented and has bizarre side-effects that screw me all the time: I get these fucking invisible force fields inserted into the line between my characters whenever I yank some text onto the line that has a prompt or a command line on it, and I can't move past them with ^A or ^E (but sometimes I can -- they're not predictable which is even worse)! And I can get any number of these fucking invisible force fields on my line, so in order to get to the beginning of the line I have to go ^A, look at the screen to see if I made it, type ^B ^A if I didn't, again and again, until I drill past all the invisible force fields that are trying to make my day happier.

And then I have to mark the beginning of the line I want to edit and repeat, go to the end of line by drilling back some number of opposite facing invisible force fields (which may be in different places than the ones going the other direction), and then kill the region, go to the end of the buffer, then yank the entire line to get a copy of it without any fucking invisible force fields in it.

But if there is an invisible force field in the line, or I just want to edit a few characters of the line and that adds some invisible force fields that were not even there before, and then I hit return in the vain hope of re-entering the entire line but not the prompt, it just enters the tail of the line after the last invisible force field, making an error in the shell, or sometimes even executing a totally different command than I intended and totally fucking me over.

I would really like somebody to explain what the fuck the idea behind the invisible force fields are, and give me the address of whoever thought is was such a brilliant idea, so I can send a robot drone to firebomb their house, or worse yet send RMS to live with them for a few months. Why did they do something so terrible, that totally fucks up such common important operations, to solve a trivial problem that has a much better solution?

Emacs used to be totally predictable. I learned it at 300 baud over the ARPANET on ITS, and I could type ahead hundreds of characters to do all kinds of stuff, and then go take a piss or get a drink or take a bong hit, and come back later, and it would be in exactly the state I meant for it to end up in. Now, I can't do that even on a local display. And for some fucking reason, it waits for up to five seconds sometime before updating the display when I'm running it in a terminal (especially when I start an incremental search or query replace). What the fuck is that about??! Not only is it totally unpredictable and forces me to stop what I'm doing and wait for it to catch up so I can figure out what state it guessed its way into before going on, but it won't paint the screen for five seconds when running on a modern top-of-the-line computer!

Emacs has become a shrine to outrageous violations of the principle of least astonishment. I just can't figure out how they could have come up with so many ways to corrupt it, when it used to work so well. It's totally unpredictable now, and I can't type ahead any more, so I have to type a few characters, look at the screen to see how it misinterpreted my intentions, and then try to work around the misunderstanding.

So my post with links to articles about what he actually did and said is ridiculous and awful, but nothing Scott Adams has ever done or said is ridiculous and awful?

And what's so ridiculous and awful about linking to Scott Adam's own misogynistic rants and the reactions they provoked? I'm certainly not the only one who disagrees with you and thinks Scott Adams is a certifiable douchebag. Are your sensitive oppressed male feelings hurt that I pointed out his history of saying misogynistic things like "The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles."

"He never called anyone an idiot." Get your facts straight. You could at least read the links I provided before making stuff up. His sock puppet called people who disagree with him idiots, in the same breath as calling himself a genius:

"If an idiot and a genius disagree, the idiot generally thinks the genius is wrong. He also has lots of idiot reasons to back his idiot belief. That’s how the idiot mind is wired. It’s fair to say you disagree with Adams. But you can’t rule out the hypothesis that you’re too dumb to understand what he’s saying. And he’s a certified genius. Just sayin’."

The fact that you have to make stuff up that's not true totally invalidates your arguments.

"He's not emotionally invested in the issue like you are." And how can you possibly say that he's not emotionally invested in the issue after reading what he said, unless you ARE just Scott Adam's sock puppet, and therefore have special insight into his private mental state. It certainly sounds to me like he's extremely emotionally invested in the issue, enough to create sock puppet accounts and write ridiculous awful narcissistic crap like that, which you interpret as not ridiculous, not awful, and not emotionally invested, since you have so much insight into his mental state, yet no investment in devoting yourself to the cause of carrying his douchebag water. (That's sarcasm, Scott.)

And there are MUCH better causes for YOU to devote yourself to than the Sysiphian task of carrying Scott Adam's douchebag water.

Nobody had mentioned what a douchebag he is yet, so it's a valid and relevant point to raise. And posting a few links is a lot less effort than the all the time and energy Scott Adams puts into his sock puppetry, so why not?

Seeing as how you're so devoted to your own cause, why aren't you also criticizing his sock puppets for being so devoted to their cause of praising him and calling everyone who doesn't agree an idiot? Obviously a lot of people here didn't already know what a douchebag he is, and now they do. Do you agree that he's a douchebag, or do you beg to differ, agree with his misogynistic opinions, and do you care to justify and explain his well documented behavior and opinions and blatant narcissistic sockpuppetry?

Are you another one of Scott Adam's sock puppets? http://jezebel.com/5792583/dilbert-creator-pretends-to-be-hi...

Foolish stuff like posing as his biggest fan on message boards to say how brilliant he is and how stupid everyone else is for not seeing that? "If an idiot and a genius disagree, the idiot generally thinks the genius is wrong. He also has lots of idiot reasons to back his idiot belief. That's how the idiot mind is wired. It's fair to say you disagree with Adams. But you can't rule out the hypothesis that you're too dumb to understand what he's saying. And he's a certified genius. Just sayin'."

Foolish stuff like saying things like "Women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone"?

Should I go on? I could go on and on and on, quoting him making a total douchbag of himself. He never stops, he just keeps digging deeper.

His sock puppets seem to care a lot about what he has to say about all forms of douchbaggery.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/06/17/the-saga-o...

Scott Adams is up to his old obliviously obtuse act again. You may recall that the creator of Dilbert is an apologist for creationism, a pathetic anti-atheist wanker, and a narcissistic sock puppeteer, but did you know he’s also an obnoxist sexist pig? Oh, right, you did already know that. OK, but now he’s revising his personal history and making up stories about being a poor oppressed man, crushed by the matriarchy.

http://comicsalliance.com/scott-adams-plannedchaos-sockpuppe...

http://amptoons.com/blog/2011/06/16/scott-adams-still-a-douc...

http://www.rickworley.com/2012/06/20/scott-adams-douchebags-...

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/douchebag-decree-scott-adams-d...

http://bbs.boingboing.net/t/incredibly-interesting-authors-0...

http://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/gqzgx/dilbert_creato...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/06/21/987473/-Scott-Adams...

http://www.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/04/18/the-guy-...

...and so on...

Beastie Boys known to let the stream ... drop!

Lisp's syntax is the easiest thing about it to understand. In fact, Lisp's syntax is so easy to understand, that even Lisp can understand its own syntax.

How would a language's support for garbage collection make it any harder to compile a non-garbage-collected language into it? Why would you think that?

You need to dip your quill in the ink well more often. I can't read what you're writing, sir!

Better than your faded light text, dude. Please provide contrast! ;)

Hell itself isn't such a bad place, either. All the interesting people will be there.

I think Doug Engelbart deserves credit for introducing the chord keyboard, which he demonstrated in "The Mother of All Demos", not a fictional book written by that homophobic anti-American bigoted foaming at the mouth lunatic Mormon cult member who sits on the board of directors of the National Organization for Marriage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs http://americablog.com/2009/04/mormon-leader-of-nom-appears-...

I own an original Enbelbart chord keyboard and mouse set. It was given to me by a friend who worked at SRI, who maintained Doug's PDP-10 that he used to give demos of his work. Some day I hope to hook them up to an Arduino, so I can use them on a more portable computer that a PDP-10!

Or 69!

More like HP mutilated Unix. ;)

It might date me, but my English teacher explained the passive voice, and its nefarious uses, by quoting Ronald Reagan on the Iran/Contra Scandal: "Mistakes were made."

>Wayland exists to be legacy cruft that no one cares about anymore.

FTFY

The ORIGINAL geniuses, because of course nobody ever thought of replacing X11 before, so all is left for you to do is to use your unbridled creativity to decide whether to call it X12 or Y1.

Even H-POX??!