Viewing profile — BellsOnSunday

I thought this was going to be https://web.archive.org/web/20120106121645/http://wiki.alu.o... . Brings back memories of following comp.lang.lisp, not least as a sort of soap opera…

Apart from the bit about killing people, for the most part.

Who says that's the advice "in England"? I'm in England and it isn't my advice.

Recently like in the last hundred years?

More likely but not certain. People who rely on this rhetorically tend to ignore it isn't a slam dunk.

There is the Simple Haskell initiative, which encourages what you're talking about, but no flag or pragma that says "this project uses simple Haskell". Obviously, simplicity is in …

In the UK the Consumer's Association and Which? fulfil the same role, and has been going since the 1950s. Before the internet the magazine was a part of everyday life for many - if…

I've just finished Pamuk's novel A Strangeness in my Mind, where the protagonist is a street vendor of the traditional Turkish beverage boza. Boza is a mildly alcoholic fermented b…

There are university leagues for every kind of sport in the UK. Most of the people involved take it very seriously but it's still just a form of recreation and doesn't attract crow…

Given what he did to the British economy in the shortest tenure of any chancellor, it's easy to believe he doesn't know what day it is.

Whoever worked out how to light a fire must have been very popular for a while, and then rapidly lost ground to the person who gave it a name.

Most of those words weren't coined by him, his writing was just the earliest source that the dictionary makers could find. He didn't invent the word 'elbow', for instance.

Same way that Shakespeare "invented" the word "elbow" and thousands of others.

In the 19th C it was a word in the West Country dialect Thomas Hardy knew well, and appears in Jude the Obscure to describe the pig's member that is thrown at Jude. Apart from this…

C-h f butterfly

Yep. That's me. I bet you're wondering how I got myself into this situation...

What's the little book of his about a man and a woman trapped on an island where they geekily explain things to each other? I might be misremembering the setting...started it once …

I think the tobacco industry has been no slouch in the marketing department, but the real difference is that there's no way to use tobacco that is safe and beneficial for you.

Yep, I was going to comment that if you write your own compiler you'll find plenty of bugs, which is the same point.

I know I won't be thanked for pointing out non-technical infelecities in the writing, and I'm not a grammar nazi or anything but... "There was a lot of excellent Haskell writing th…

It doesn't matter where Alec Guinness was born, he sounded about as Scottish as the Queen. Ewan McGregor's English accent OTOH sounds fake.

I found out how to pronounce sal volatile just the other day, perhaps thirty years after first reading it (crops up quite a lot in Victorian novels). Fortunately, I never once had …

I don't know who John Cleese was talking about but the great comic actor Ronnie Barker (of The Two Ronnies, for you Americans) was like that. Always playing a Cockney barrow boy, W…

You need this ominous sounding permission to intervene and pause an app when a call comes in.

A lot of the points you raise aren't much to do with it being dated IMO, merely the style in which its written. You say "we'd do this, we wouldn't do that" (where "we" is presumabl…