Re:The Night Watch [pdf]
by ncann on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @11:06PM
(#34527564)
> There will be rich debates about the
socioeconomic implications of Helvetica Light, and at some
point, you will have to decide whether serifs are daring statements of modernity, or tools of hegemonic oppression that
implicitly support feudalism and illiteracy
> HCI people discover bugs
by receiving a concerned email from their therapist. Systems people discover bugs by waking up and discovering that their
first-born children are missing and “ETIMEDOUT ” has been
written in blood on the wall.
> You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque
language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use
a modern language with garbage collection and functional
programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the
answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware under
stands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place
a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware
learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.
> HCI people discover bugs by receiving a concerned email from their therapist. Systems people discover bugs by waking up and discovering that their first-born children are missing and “ETIMEDOUT ” has been written in blood on the wall.
> You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware under stands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.
I love this classic, full of memorable quotes