I find flash-based ads extremely frustrating (and that's why I installed flashblock). Many of my friends did the same, so I guess that besides annoying, they are not effective.

AFAIK gcc is not the best designed program in the world (I just compiled it once, and to me it seemed to be a huge bunch of patches over patches).

At the same time I know C++ enough to consider it extremely error-prone, expecially if not managed correctly!

Put together the two things and ...maybe it's time to have a look to some other compiler. What about TCC? :P

...or LLVM :-P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Level_Virtual_Machine

"The Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) is a compiler infrastructure, written in C++, which is designed for compile-time, link-time, run-time, and "idle-time" optimization of programs written in arbitrary programming languages. "

I am hoping LLVM / clang actually give GCC some competition. I like the direction of using the same code for the compiler in tools.

Since I managed to run GNU/Linux properly, I thought that software can also be good. Grewing I started to put my hands in software development, and now I'm aware that everything sucks. I realized this by myself, than I read this article and ...well, I totally agree.

There's no good software out there. There's just software that sucks less.

That's a little strong. Of course there is good software out there. There's even great software out there, just not much.

In a field where the barrier to entry is so low it is natural that the average quality will be lower. Compare this to say, aircraft design, where the bar to entry is skyhigh (pun intended) and as such average quality is higher.

I always try ls even when I'm on the real windows terminal, and I suffer each time it happens. Fortunately it's a rare event.

One of the first things I do on a new windows box is put a batch file called ls.bat in a directory in my path that just calls dir!

I tend to drop windows ports of a bunch of unix command line utils somewhere in my PATH

http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

Install powershell, or use win 7 (comes with powershell). It comes preconfigured with aliases for rm, ls, cat, etc...

First thing I do is install Cygwin.

Ah, so I'm not the only one experiencing suffering when having to use Windows. :)

Recently learned about AndLinux [1] and CoLinux [2] -- running a Linux kernel atop Windows. Didn't use it yet but looks promising.

[1] http://www.andlinux.org/ [2] http://www.colinux.org/

Good point. Also how can you measure this speed when talking about C? First of all there's not only one single implementation of the compiler, and second thing for available architecture you may have different performances basing on the quality of the backend...

I find that kind of claim pretty annoying.

I've found this interesting article on OSNews

Awesome... a professor told me about this too... I was wondering why this story appeared only today in ycombinator, since this is an old stuff... not so weird: I've noticed that the mail has been sent in 1997... :)

Maybe people haven't wanted to duplicate everything that has been on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/xmq0/what_reall...