71–80 of 122 posts
Great post, but I don't think the author really knows what 'flamer' means when he uses it to describe Linus Torvalds
Flamer: One who flames people on the internet, often the wearer of asbestos underwear, a frequent participant in flame wars. Linus has flamed plenty of people
> Time for some serious flamefesting!
> I don't usually get into flames, but I'm touchy when it comes to linux :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You still find plenty people harping on about the Unix Philosophy, even though that in modern times it's nigh irrelevant, and significant parts of it are technically obsolete. Yeah, parsing text streams was sorta okay in the 80s, but is very troublesome and brittle in the modern age. Have you confused the Unix Philosophy with Unix itself? The Unix Philosophy doesn't have any technical components which might become…
It's a fuzzy matter because it doesn't have a single agreed on definition. But yes, some parts are definitely showing their age: > Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Putting things together from a kit of parts isn't necessarily the optimal way to do many things. In many cases tight integration actually produces superior results, and debugging a system made from many cooperating bits isn't necessarily an…
The reason why this is part of the Unix philosophy is not merely because of the productivity it provides, but largely because of the power it affords end users. Most of the programs on my computer are GUIs that don't interact with each other. How much more powerful and flexible would my PC be if they were designed to do one thing well and be slotted together.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can't make the distinction without an internal testament, then yeah that's a religious idea. It's the mark of a religious idea.
I honestly don't understand what you mean. Can you challenge one of my assertions more directly, so that I can better understand? For example, do you believe Folklore.org is about what people commonly understand as "folklore"; or that Stallman believes himself a saint; or that programming "religious wars" (e.g. vim vs emacs, or Linux vs Windows) are truly religious in nature? Do you believe when people talk about the…
If someone does canonize Stallman, then Stallman's beliefs on the matter are similarly irrelevant. The "religious" behavior is exactly the same. There's just no supernatural element. But you already don't believe there's a supernatural element. So I guess I just don't get the distinction you're making here.
Just the idea that you think something can be "truly" religious exposes this for what it is: Your opinion on a thing. You're an atheist and you don't think anything is truly religious, right? All pictures of Jesus are a guy dressed as Jesus. I just don't understand why the picture of Stallman dressed as Jesus is different. To you I mean. I get why I think that but I'm a Christian.
Do you have any actual religious behaviors to point to that aren't already human behaviors? Because right now it's like, two guys are doing cartwheels. But one guy thinks cartwheels are very important so it's fundamentally different when he does them. The other guy was just doing cartwheels for fun so it's not the same.
Mel wasn't fictional. Melvin Kaye was an application programmer at Librascope, and there's a photo of him in the company newsletter. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/macho-programmers-drum-mem...
Great post, but I don't think the author really knows what 'flamer' means when he uses it to describe Linus Torvalds
One weird thing I noticed over time is the enshrinement of old and crappy technologies, in the face of all reason. Some examples: Some people for some reason I can't understand have warm and fuzzy feelings about FTP, despite it being a horrible protocol in multiple ways. Yet, for a long time it was often thought of being the "proper" way to download stuff, even though even HTTP is technically better in many respects.…
I much prefer Unix philosophy to contenerized microservices for Todo list app philosophy.
People were using the “Unix philosophy” in the 2000s to try to satisfy the demands of the consumer internet. It failed miserably at that, and was replaced.
A lot of the cultural phenomena around Rust can best be explained in religious terms. It's no accident that we are sometimes referred to as the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force," and the word "zealot" is frequently used, of course largely by critics. There's a deeper level as well. The concept of "memory safety" which is a core principle of Rust has, I believe, a lot in common with religious concepts of purity and clean…
Eating pork won't cause memory corruption.
(Is only joke - no srs)
Great post, but I don't think the author really knows what 'flamer' means when he uses it to describe Linus Torvalds
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You still find plenty people harping on about the Unix Philosophy, even though that in modern times it's nigh irrelevant, and significant parts of it are technically obsolete. Yeah, parsing text streams was sorta okay in the 80s, but is very troublesome and brittle in the modern age. Have you confused the Unix Philosophy with Unix itself? The Unix Philosophy doesn't have any technical components which might become…
It's a fuzzy matter because it doesn't have a single agreed on definition. But yes, some parts are definitely showing their age: > Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Putting things together from a kit of parts isn't necessarily the optimal way to do many things. In many cases tight integration actually produces superior results, and debugging a system made from many cooperating bits isn't necessarily an…
One weird thing I noticed over time is the enshrinement of old and crappy technologies, in the face of all reason. Some examples: Some people for some reason I can't understand have warm and fuzzy feelings about FTP, despite it being a horrible protocol in multiple ways. Yet, for a long time it was often thought of being the "proper" way to download stuff, even though even HTTP is technically better in many respects.…
The name is the reason. You see, it is the File Transfer Protocol. Do you need to transfer a file? Use the protocol designed to transfer files! Why would you use something silly like a Hypertext protocol for binary!? I see similar conflation of the name-vs-reality all the time. My favourite is the “secure” network that is differentiated not by firewall access policy, but by name only. Literally just a label.
Because it’s faster with http, doesn’t require firewall/nat trickery at either side, is secure out of box via https, can be easily gui-ed via index plugin, cached via a proxy/cdn, supports “moved elsewhere” and other issue reporting.
And if you ignore that “Hypertext” word that is there historically and look at http as just a metadata+data transfer protocol, it is clearly superior to ftp for any sort of data transfer.