hbex5

It must be nice to live in a world so isolated that smartphones just completely passed you by.

Imagine being the diehard Zune fan who felt his best option for a replacement was going all in with Windows Phone.

Idris is one of those languages that when I learned it felt like it was offering me a glimpse into a possible future.

I love it when that happens.

I mean... Amazing stuff. How..?

My mind refuses to believe it's actually possible EVEN AFTER I TRIED IT AND SAW IT WORKING.

The universe is a lie.

So as somebody who lives in London, explain to me why Los Angeles always looks so featureless, so lacking in any kind of urban identity I'd expect to find in a city?

It always looks to me no so much as a city, but rather merely some buildings that are connected by freeways.

Basically only two paradigms survived the 90s. The Unix way (via Linux, BSD, Darwin) and the VMS way (via Windows NT). Everything else is either ultra-niche, dying, a mainframe so ancient and terrifying nobody will go near it, or only of marginal historical import.

Bear in mind that when this book was written, the average desktop PC was running MS-DOS, and possibly Windows 3.1 if it was new and powerful enough.

What UNIX is being compared to is the other mainframe OSes of the 1980s, from DEC's VAX/VMS to IBM's OS/360 and OS/400

This puts Labour in a very difficult position. The bill will, of course, carry. But this will expose the wide gulf between the Labour leadership and its traditional white working class base (who were overwhelmingly leave) as it tries to straddle two stools and fails.

I expect the Prime Minister is quietly allowing herself a wry smile as she realises what a powerful weapon to beat the opposition with she has been handed by the court.

Be under no illusions, although the bill will pass, this could do serious damage to the opposition in the process, as Labour MPs decide whether to vote against their hearts and frustrate the democratic will of their constituents or prefer to ensure their career prospects.

Around 70% of Labour MPs are in seats where leave was a majority, but most Labour MPs are urban liberal types who want to remain and will be viewed as traitors by the Twitterati and Guardian set if they side with their constituents.

I really don't envy Jeremy Corbyn.

Orwell's advice on how to write better English is at best naively harmfully, and at worst cravenly hypocritical. He never followed his own "rules", why in the hell should anyone else? Answer: because his rules are self-serving bullshit.

Case in point: Orwell uses passive constructions 40% more frequently than than an average English corpus. This essay is full of them. Language Log did a brilliant analysis of the essay's towering inaccuracy and hypocrisy:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992

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If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

And wouldn't you know it, the very first sentence of Orwell's essay runs:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

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His rules are bullshit, and he knew it, which is why he was smart enough to ignore them completely.

It's not entirely clear with the GPLv2 that that's the case. The FSF claims that because modules are loading into the address space of the kernel that makes them an integrated part of a single program and not mere aggregation, and are therefore covered by the GPLv2's restrictions as a derivative work.

It should be noted, however, that this is merely the FSF's opinion, and this has never been definitively legally established.

The GPLv3 was designed to, inter alia, eliminate such ambiguities, but added so much complexity it never really caught on outside the GNU project.

Lisp's propensity for terse, expressive code. Persistent data structures. A novel approach to concurrency by mainstream language standards.

Clojure is currently the sexy lisp du jour.

When I first learned Clojure, to me it was the first time programming truly clicked with me. That first time I ever felt that spark of "oh my god, so that's what programming can be like!"

And it is wonderful.

It's one of those games that manages to push buttons in your brain you never knew you had, and make you feel like a genius when something finally clicks.

And it does all this without ever needing to explain anything.

Jonathan Blow's enigma variations. A meandering meditation on the means by which humans gain knowledge and understanding of the world, by standing on the shoulders of a hacking minigame.

Also it's gorgeous.

Did I mention it's BRILLIANT?

That both indicates to me why Perl 6 is cool, and also why it's a bit mad. Junctions, in the core language? Really? Wouldn't they be best placed just being a library?

It's basically impossible to write safe code in C. Surely that makes it pretty damn poor at what it does?

Especially since system code is the place where safety matters most.