Constructing a social system that tends to those who agree with it is a piece of cake compared to constructing one that makes those who disagree with it want to obey its principles.
Counting lines is probably a good idea if you want to print it out and are short on paper, but I fail to see the purpose otherwise.
I have long since given up dealing with people who hold idiotic opinions as if they had arrived at them through thinking about them.
Very clever implementation techniques are required to implement this insanity correctly and usefully, not to mention that code written with this feature used and abused east and west is exceptionally exciting to debug.
Would you buy a book proudly stating on the cover that its reader is a dummy? Or would you think “of course it’s ironic”?
Norway did not even have a revolution at the time the rest of Europe was busy figuring out human rights and stuff, because we were busy fighting over how to spell it.
Once we were Programmers. Maybe our last best hope is a movie.
In Norway, we have a community of people who prefer to use a version of Norwegian that looks very much like lutefisk: Dug up remains from the garbage heap of history and dressed up to look like a tradition.
Those who write software only for pay should go hurt some other field.
Optimization is generally detrimental to future success, but it is the only way to accomplish present success in competition with others who are equally interested in short-term results.
I’m bothered by the fact that stupid people don’t spontaneously combust, which they should.
Have you considered the option of getting the joke? If not, try it now and redeem your soul.
Enlightenment is probably antithetical to impatience.
C is not clean – the language has many gotchas and traps, and although its semantics are simple in some sense, it is not any cleaner than the assembly-language design it is based on.
What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.
Let’s just hope that all the world is run by Bill Gates before the Perl hackers can destroy it.
Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes.
Elegance is necessarily unnatural, only achieveable at great expense. If you just do something, it won’t be elegant, but if you do it and then see what might be more elegant, and do it again, you might, after an unknown number of iterations, get something that is very elegant.
All experience has taught us that solving a complex problem uncovers hidden assumptions and ever more knowledge, trade-offs that we didn’t anticipate but which can make the difference between meeting a deadline and going into research mode for a year, etc.
The only important property of evils of the past is that they not be repeated in the future, in any way, shape, or form.
XML is a giant step in no direction at all.