anom9999

The weird thing is I thought I'd read somewhere that said Go defaulted to a process per CPU core (like the OP has hardcoded ib this project). I'm guessing that isn't the case then? It sadly wouldn't be the first time I've misread something! :(

I've had a play with this myself and found that it cause sporadic and unpredictable crashing (very different style of application though - I was building a webserver). However this was an earlier iteration of Go (possibly Go 1.1 but likely 1.2) so things may have improved since then, or you might have found a saner way of tweaking it.

There are lots of command line hooks for GUIs. Want to copy data to the clipboard from the command line? xclip. Want to pop up a notification in your desktop environment's notification bar? notify-send "hello world!" etc

> As for /proc/sys, not all UNIXes have such features.

That example of mine was clearly taken from Linux - so it goes without saying that most UNIXes would behave different in that specific regard. Even so, they'd still have command line tools for doing the same thing (and to be fair, Linux does too, even with a vaguely-Plan 9 virtual file system)

> In Oberon I could pipe selected text from any application into any command that had a GUI aware type signature, for example.

Well like I said, I'm not trying to say that all REPL's are equal, but most of what you're describing is still possible in at least Linux. I'm not saying it's as intuitive nor "pretty" as it would have been on the Oberon, but it's certainly possible.

To be quite honest, most of what you've been posting on this topic has really just been elitism. And I do actually sympathise with your point as working in Bash can be a complete hateful mess at times (even without comparing it to the old Lisp machines). But that doesn't change the fact that Bash is a REPL environment.

Arguing that one is better than the other is like arguing over which colour the best. Which is why I get so utterly sick of Perl being compared with Python - they are all going to have their strengths and weaknesses so at the end of the day, the "better" language / syntax boils down to personal preference.

REPL is just a Turing-complete real time interpreter. Which means even the VBA "Immediate" panel in (as seen in MS Office) is REPL. And it means Bash is REPL too.

The question you're raising is whether all REPLs are equal. Lisp machines definitely had more control over the host than VBA does. But that doesn't mean that VBA's immediate panel isn't REPL just because a more powerful example exists.

As for Bash, that's a bit of a weird one because Bash wouldn't be much without the accompanying GNU / POSIX userland. But if you're willing to include a UNIX / Linux userland into scope then Bash has just as much control over the host as Lisp did on Lisp machines. But even without the aid of forking additional executables, Bash can still modify the state of the kernel directly. eg

    echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
    echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

In my personal opinion, I prefer C-style braces over whitespace formatted blocks. Which means I find reading function and iteration blocks much easier to read in Perl than I do in Python. I'm not saying one is "better" than the other, but just offering a counter argument for how subjective language aesthetics really is.

The problem with Perl is most times people are exposed to it, it's either from code golfing sessions were code is deliberately obfuscated; or when it's basically been used as a shell scripting language and thus often written by aging Perl hackers who don't care much for code cleanliness. And sometimes people just run away screaming because they simply don't understand all the regular expressions (but to approach Perl without an understanding of Regex is a little like trying to code Java without understanding classes then moaning about the weird surplus boilerplate code)

I'm not trying to say that Perl doesn't have it's faults. It has a great many problems. But to state that Perls syntax makes it impossible to write clean code, is just a daft flamewar argument.

It's a joyful place with so much old technology yet a refreshingly hands on attitude. I don't think there was a single exhibit that wasn't interactive by one method or another - which really matters when you're talking about technology that is largely at an age where kids are too young to have grown up with so it gives them a chance to play with the predecessors to their much loved consumer hardware - and it gives us adults a chance to do more than just reminisce about the fun days experimenting with emerging technologies.

I'd highly recommend that museum on it's own merit; let alone spending the day exploring the site and Bletchly Park as well.

Should read: "...I'm certainly not productive."

Just because you struggled with the Linux paradigm, it doesn't mean that it's an unproductive platform.

Perhaps not if you plan of contributing code to any open source OS. Practices like this can leave projects exposed to intellectual property violations.

This is why reverse engineering usually requires more people, each who isn't privy to the previous persons source material.

It's funny you say that because I used to joke that Ballmer did more to aid the adoption of Linux than Shuttleworth had.

The criteria is as simple as that.

Running around a VR modelled web page made me feel like the Lawnmower Man or Joey hacking into the Ellingson Mineral Company supercomputer (well, maybe not Joey specifically because he was a n00b)

What we had to wait for was the technology to be reinvented a dozen times before client side web languages finally reached the same point that desktop software development was 20 years previously (and let's not forget the prolonged stagnation in web technologies as pioneered by the dominance of IE6).

I also agree that the world just wasn't ready for VRML. It was so far ahead of it's time that it even pre-dated 3D hardware accelerated graphics chips coming as standard on desktop PCs!

UK != US. So it stands to reason that I wasn't talking about Clinton specifically. But it's amusing to see the same stories happening on both sides of the pond.

While some of the more conservative people out there might disagree with people taking drugs, the fact remains that people do want to get high and thus those people will always find way to do so. To me, it makes more sense not to turn those people into outlaws and instead concentrate your efforts on tackling those who turn to drugs for non-recreational reasons (eg resolving addiction and/or peoples dependency on stimulants for escapism. Those individuals usually have other real life issues and -wrongly- turn to drugs as their "fix").

This will never happen though because drugs are given such a bad connotation in the press as the roots of all evil. Not all drugs are equal; whose which are proven to be relatively harmless compared to tobacco or alcohol are given the ridiculous label of "gateway drugs" - as if anyone who smokes two puff of a joint will automatically end up on the streets shooting heroin. If we want people off the harder drugs then we have to teach kids that not all drugs are equally bad - and to do this we need governments to send a saner political message about their stance on drugs.

From a personal perspective, I've done a few "magic mushrooms" at festivals in my younger years. They made me a little giddy but at no point did I rape, steal nor murder. In fact I was more pleasant company than when I've been drinking (and I'm not a rude drunk by any means). Yet since then, the UK government has made magic mushrooms illegal. It's just absurd to think that my previous actions, which were entirely harmless at the time, are now illegal. And when kids experiment (as many kids often do) they too will learn that government legislation is broken towards "softer" drugs. Which will make then re-evaluate their opinion about their governments stance on all drugs. So the government are really just wasting their own time and our public money by continuing on this charade that all recreational chemicals are evil.

The most hypocritical thing of all though, is I bet a great many of those in power have smoked weed at some point when they were teenagers / young adults (as we saw in the UK with the amusing yet frustrating confessions a few years back where several politicians came forward and admitted to "smoking but not inhaling". sigh