This is a disgusting perspective. The same people who champion descriptivism conveniently tend also to champion prescriptivism selectively, such as with the transexual madness over pronouns. No, I'm a prescriptivist, and I feel so strongly about it that I'd kill. Languages have rules, damn it, and damn those who disagree with this.
Tell me, do either of us see people championing this for other languages? I don't. I think, if a white man learned Chinese and butchered it, and a Chinese man corrected him, that would be fine. Why is it different for English?
Without prescriptivism, we'll see "Me love you long time" be considered to be as acceptable as "I will love you for a long time" and the very thought sickens me.
Hello, unixbane. I believe we may be kindred spirits. Have an invitation to my website, which is mentioned in my profile here. We seem to agree on many things, such as the disgusting nature of UNIX, the WWW, and Unicode; I largely view them as different shapes of the same evil. From my website is the e-mail address I use, and we may discuss the topic further through that, say.
My first thought, upon seeing this is licensed under the GPLv3, is that it wouldn't be legal to run under iOS, as the Tivoization aspect would come into play. However, as there is but one author, this issue doesn't materialize, although the sole author is the only one who can legally submit this to run under any machine, barring that private app exception I'm rather certain someone would mention if I didn't first.
It's nice that you've chosen the GPL, as I also prefer that license, but what value do you see in this software that only you can modify for use? Do you intend to release an Android or other port, at some point?
Thank you for the comment. I learned a few things about licensing. The main reason I chose GPL was because I don't want someone else building a commercial closed source application based on my app; others can still fork the project and modify it.
I don't intend to release this app on any other platform but others who want to may feel free - I think GPL allows for this. In the end, I don't really care what others do with my app as long as they consult me about what they want to do with it, which MIT is too loose for. If others want to release an app based on mine, they can feel free.
> The main reason I chose GPL was because I don't want someone else building a commercial closed source application based on my app; others can still fork the project and modify it.
GPL is generally the best choice for that.
> In the end, I don't really care what others do with my app as long as they consult me about what they want to do with it
There’s no popular license that I know of that requires people to tell you about their fork. They can just release it and publish the code along with it.
> Tivoization is the creation of a system that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license, but uses hardware restrictions to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware. [...] Stallman believes this practice denies users some of the freedom that [GPL] was designed to protect.
Apple doesn't allow GPLv3 code if there are multiple contributors? I thought they didn't allow GPLv3 code at all (and that this app required you to compile and install it as as a developer .. never had an eyeProduct so I'm not even sure what the dev process is like).
Just to clarify for the developer, thasian, because you have all rights in the code you can license it differently to different users. The version on github will be gpl; you presumably could have different license for app store purchasers. I think the ios port of Vim is done this way, it's github link is https://github.com/terrychou/iVim . Not sure if that's actually the way terrychou did it, but surely you could ask him about it.
In that case, what license should I change to? As long as others who want to release an app based on my source code consults me about it, I will let them.
I see nothing wrong with GPLv3 here; what exactly is the problem? Tivoization doesn’t make sense because people can just recompile the app themselves and install it.
I've now modified the article to include measurements and also point out that the program does, in fact, seem to largely comply with POSIX behaviour, although it doesn't assume no number shall exceed six digits or other things POSIX permits.
I do have some testing that showed me the Common Lisp was roughly the same speed as the C, when testing against a file of a few dozen megabytes. As I explain, I wasn't interested in optimizing it further, as I feel showing this achieved in just a few minutes to be valuable on its own. I also note that a C programmer may boast about being a small fraction of a second faster, ignoring everything else that goes into the program, which I find foolish.
The reason I didn't strictly adhere to the POSIX behavior was because I don't know where this is documented and don't feel like scanning through the C to find out. On all of the files I've tested, which include a wide array of punctuation and other such things, the results were identical, but I'm merely not making any promises. I'd prefer to not be accused of being one of those Lispers who only complete part of the program; if you look at the libraries I've written, which actually concern me, then you'll find they're well-documented and rather comprehensive for their purposes.
I timed it on a 329MB 'tags' file I had lying around, and got 30.6 seconds for the lisp version, vs. 1.07 seconds for the BSD-style `wc` shipped with OSX. I used SBCL installed from brew.
POSIX is about compatibility for 2 programming languages: C99 and Bourne Shell. POSIX incorporates the C99 spec by reference, and duplicates much of it (lots of pages say "The functionality described on this reference page is aligned with the ISO C standard. Any conflict between the requirements described here and the ISO C standard is unintentional."), but does not fully include/duplicate the C99 spec.
since humans are on average a terrible organism, at least in relation to the values we espouse.
Surely you recognize the irony in stating this here, considering the pieces of shit who create these startups are responsible for making the world worse at a large scale, purely for their own gain, right?
It's obscene to me how you've written this. These startups ignore major laws, break numerous consumer protection laws as well, purposefully provide mechanisms intended to hurt anyone but themselves, erode societal trust, and even kill people, and yet you're blaming the people these vampires feed from?
With this book, you'll learn that UNIX and C are nothing admirable and have actually been responsible for successfully destroying much better systems and languages in the popular eye; languages including Lisp, APL, Simula, ALGOL, Smalltalk, and Forth all existed before C; systems such as ITS and Multics addressed concerns UNIX users still suffer under today.
Make no mistake, for all of RMS' admirable qualities, he's basically responsible for UNIX proliferating by copying it for GNU. You also shouldn't look at your modern BSD or GNU system and think this is what UNIX users used decades ago, because for all of their faults, GNU and BSD actually try to produce programs which work correctly and GNU goes much farther than several of the BSDs in this respect. The UNIX attitude is one of getting half the job done and leaving it at that.
In closing, UNIX has no philosophy. The UNIX philosophy is simply brand-named simplicity. The ideas of modularity and simplicity predate automatic computing and recorded history, and yet people will claim you're following UNIX if you write a program which adheres to these basic ideals. Further, those other qualities of this philosophy result in programs that aren't modular, simple, nor beautiful.
The Handbook is a fine document and any computing history fan worth their salt should read it, but it's hardly the best analysis of Unix in a historical perspective.
Blaming (or crediting, however you want to think about it) GNU for proliferation of Unix is anachronistic. RMS has repeatedly said he doesn't care for the design of Unix, but he chose it for the ease of implementation. GNU wasn't even bootable as a stand-alone OS before 1990s and certainly not production ready until Linux was. Using GNU utilities in proprietary Unices was popular, at least since the 90s, but I never heard anyone consider them a "killer app" for Unix.
I used to have a couple of PC World articles about Windows winning the Workstation market, until about GNU/Linux started to be mature enough to allow easy porting of commercial UNIX stuff into them.
Had Microsoft and IBM kept serious about their POSIX compatibility subsystems instead of a bullet point to win government contracts, and history would have played out much differently.
It's certainly an interesting critique, but it also massively oversells itself and is totally lacking in self-awareness if you take it seriously.
Computing is absolutely full of widely deployed working technologies that enable people to get work done all day but that have rough edges. For every one of these, there is somebody saying that you should use <pet technology> instead. Usually with missionary levels of zeal. And yet at no point do they seriously address why people might have good reasons for adopting the allegedly inferior solution.
> And yet at no point do they seriously address why people might have good reasons for adopting the allegedly inferior solution.
With an emphasis on "allegedly" sometimes. For example, C is hugely superior to Python in terms of machine efficiency. Does C support faster development cycles? That's right, you can write code that's practically as fast as tightly-optimized machine code! Does C prevent potentially catastrophic errors? That's right, you can write code that's practically as fast as tightly-optimized machine code! A lot of the True Zealots aren't quite as monomaniacal on a single narrow point, but the lack of ability to see a total solution is diagnostic.
So was ITS better than Unix? Not if you prioritize usability, support for application software, or ability to run on more than a single family of very expensive mainframe computers the world had begun to abandon by the time Unix hit its big growth phase. You can say similar things about LispMs, although they were more usable.
Firstly with regards to the article, this is a neat environment and simple project, but lacks niceties even basic hardware such as the Atari VCS featured, including sprite handling and collisions thereof. When I start developing 6502 games, I expect to start with the Atari VCS or NES/Famicom platform, neither of which I believe have a true framebuffer. One noteworthy and fundamental difference between these sets of environments that's particularly interesting is that this 6502asm is capable of modifying its own code, whereas the other two environments mentioned use ROM and so lack this. As for its age, it seems younger than twenty years and so certainly wouldn't qualify as a first.
Secondly, with regards to RodgerTheGreat, it's interesting to see one of your messages here. I'm not certain I'd mark CHIP-8 as the first, but that's due primarily to my not being aware of any older virtual machines used for games, discounting any games on, say, the DEUCE. I've participated in this game jam, as well as the last, so I expect my submission has been properly submitted; here's to at least one other game I submit.
You wrote that after a mere twenty minutes. Compared to how you've treated other inflammatory topics, one can't help but wonder if this is a sore spot for you. In any case, it's amusing because I'm in that set that would prefer Hacker News to actually discuss computer topics and not those such as this. My computing related articles usually go ignored, since you need to read more than the headline before you vomit forth your personal opinions, though, and the topic means not everyone is equally underqualified to give their opinion to start with.
You're right that there's a sore spot for me, but it isn't religion—it's long experience with how wretched HN threads become as soon as religion is mentioned. But I should have been more careful and not posted hastily and vaguely.
If I hadn't intervened by posting and doing other standard moderation things, though, the thread would likely have become more of a flamewar. These things don't self-correct; would that they did. I made this case more complicated by posting in a way that stirred up additional waves—it was not a splash-free dive, like we usually try for. I was distracted and my irritation managed to grab the steering wheel.
This is interesting and also unsurprising. Haskell is an abstract and high-level language and so doesn't dictate irrelevant machine details as C does. The only reason C's considered efficient at all is due to what was effectively a meme from forty years ago; there have been lifetimes of human effort wasted making C fast, only to trivially be beaten by someone using better tools. A proper analogy would be beating the world's faste runner in a mile-long dash by using a bicycle or perhaps using a cart being more efficient than carrying items on one's head; the main difference is people haven't been deluded to think that humans are faster or better at carrying cargo than a creation of mankind.
Tell me, do either of us see people championing this for other languages? I don't. I think, if a white man learned Chinese and butchered it, and a Chinese man corrected him, that would be fine. Why is it different for English?
Without prescriptivism, we'll see "Me love you long time" be considered to be as acceptable as "I will love you for a long time" and the very thought sickens me.