jpr

My reason why C++ is vastly inferior to C:

It's just too goddamn easy to make a mess in C++ without noticing it. In C, if you make a mess, you will more likely notice it before it's unmanageable.

> I am not sure all the C folks are as productive as they could've been if they switched to C++. Same people.

I'm pretty sure that C folks are much more productive using C than C++. Hating the tools you are using tends to lower productivity to a halt.

In eagerly-evaluated languages such as almost-anything-other-than-Haskell, there is much less need for monads or other weird contraptions that make it difficult to reason about the behavior of the program. When Haskell fits the problem, it's very good, when it doesn't, you probably need to employ non-portable compiler tricks.

Yes they have evolved. Not necessarily for the better IMHO.

What makes you think machines would be even deadlier drivers than humans?

I'm not well versed in CLHS legalese, but don't &rest arguments count as one argument? One would suspect so since &rest is allowed to be not copied.

I think many programmers are angry because they have to use so obviously broken technologies that have managed to capture the mainstream by only marketing, luck, ignorance or some combination of those. I certainly weep every time I look for jobs and there are ten times more jobs for PHP/MySQL than anything else.

I have a hard time figuring out how Canonical is going to make money. Most desktop users are not going to pay for support.

If you substitute "method" for "memory" it makes sense.

It's important to note that latest Ubuntu has completely fucked up the scrollbars. It would be nice if all apps actually used the new scrollbars, but only some of them do. Notable lacking the new scrollbars are such rarely used applications as Firefox and gnome-terminal.

It's Apple. They don't give a fuck about usability as long as their UI is different from that of Windows.

I guess one can construct rational arguments for turning down money if one doesn't believe in capitalism or economics or money, but that doesn't make the act of turning down money economically non-rational.

Could the downvoters please explain how it is not economically retarded to decline an offering of money for your work? I have a really difficult time understanding this.

I guess you can be matematically genius while being economically retard.

> If you think a given law is unjust, you should be campaigning to change it, not breaking it willy-nilly.

If I were to heed that advice, I couldn't do anything productive. Heck, even as it is I'm worrying about stupid laws far too much, even though I'm not breaking any (that I know of), and it's taking time away from my productive behaviour. Your argument doesn't hold water in an environment where there are many, many stupid laws.

The one casino I've been to required showing id and having your picture taken before they let you play.

When you subscribe to some ideology that can be described by a simple word, it is easy to dismiss all problems encountered while exercising that ideology by saying that "you are not being X enough", whether X is socialist, capitalist, vegan, carnivore, functional, object-oriented, static, dynamic, free, proprietary or whatever.

I used to program in Haskell for fun and school and I liked it. I find it very well thought out language. I may very well come back to programming in Haskell when I encounter a suitable project.

But there is a tendency among Haskeller's to get too caught up in praising purity and laziness, while ignoring the nice practical aspects of the language that could enable it to rise to be an even greater language.

I'm not saying that author is guilty of this, this is just a general observation. And I must admit that I'm not quite up to date of what's up with Haskell. My point is that Haskell is great for reasons other than purity and laziness, too.

And by trying to get the code to compile I'm yet again reminded why I don't like Scala:

The compiler is slow as fuck to get started and the syntax of the language is such that whitespace appears to matter. No thanks.

But I wish y'all good luck anyway.

I have to say that I was very skeptical of Unity before I tried it yesterday for the first time. It's certainly different from what most people are used to, but it's also better in many ways. I have tried at least GNOME2, KDE3, KDE4, XMonad, wmii, and different versions Windows, and I can't decide which of them I like the best. Unity is not the best for everything and takes some getting used to, but it certainly isn't bad either.

You are implying that TSA etc. were established due to legitimate risk/benefit analysis, not blind fear. I don't think that's true.

What makes GNU tools standard (other de facto)?

One thing I find hard to beat when it comes to Apple: the image.

Apple is the hip and cool thing that your artistic cousin uses, whereas Microsoft is the lame and boring thing that the enterprise uses.

Between these two stereotypes, what would be the image you would market to in order to turn huge profits like Apple is doing? I have no idea, and I think it would be unwise to just imitate Apple, they have more experience being Apple than anybody.

Lisp is not concerned by implementation details. C is somewhat concerned with implementation details.

Implementation details largely determine how fast a given program will run.

C makes it rather easy to predict how fast a piece of code will run, and what its bottlenecks will be. Lisp makes that rather hard.

Given that there are always programs that need to be as fast as possible even with hand-optimized algorithms running on top-of-the-line hardware, C will win for many applications that have even moderate performance requirements.

Also, current mainstream operating-systems favor C and C++, if only implicitly.

Also, CLisp is not a language, it's an implementation of a language named Common Lisp: http://www.gnu.org/software/clisp/

(It's common misconception, and a confusing name)

Using Lisp the same way as you do other languages isn't any more difficult than using the other languages, after you learn the syntax and the basic tools of course. It's what you can do after you've learnt the basics that sets Lisp apart.

In other words: the beginning of the learning curves of Lisp vs. other languages are about the same. Lisp's curve just continues after that.

I would like to say one thing to anyone who considers using Lisp:

It's perfectly okay to use Lisp just like you would use any other language.

It's better designed and more consistent than most others, and has good implementations. It makes sense to use Lisp as just a regular language without any wizardry.

open source != free software

I would categorize this as programmer-gore.

Why does everyone conflate allocation and initialization?

1+KLOCs a day of C? WTF?