I thought this was a nice response, and I would be interested in the naysayers' response to this response: The Biggest Myths, by Lennart Poettering.

Also, the main complaint against systemd is that it is big and monolithic, instead of a series of simple tools strung together, like cat, awk, and sed. But what about Apache, OpenOffice, and PostgreSQL?

Disclaimer: I am just a lowly web programmer, not an operating system developer or even a sysadmin.

I'm going to answer this in a different way: what I knew when I started that I think most programmers, and most people, don't. That may sound arrogant, but I keep seeing it every day of my working life.

I wasn't a computer science major or anywhere close: I was a film major and English minor. It was the English that has helped me more than anything learn very quickly certain secrets to programming effectively. And yet it wasn't even the English classes themselves, because a lot of what is fashionable to teach in English is misleading or harmful.

What really happened was a certain approach to writing. It is taught clearly in just a few books, like The Elements of Style and On Writing Well. Reading these books literally changed my life. If I were to try to summarize it, it would be that the goal of writing is to reach the reader as plainly as possible, instead of writing in a flowery, fancy, or important-sounding way. To do that actually is the greatest amount of work. It actually is the opposite of everyone's inclination. Even for professional, longtime writers, it doesn't happen on the first draft or even the seventh draft. It involves adhering to certain non-glamorous principles like using as few words as possible and preferring the short word over the long one. It means putting yourself in the background. In short, in trying to be elegant.

Just $20 a month? And that's from someone biased towards it?

Anyway, now let's see a study of how much advertising has cost each of us from:
- clicking, scrolling, and squinting for the actual content
- giving up, quitting, clicking back, and missing something
- buying, setting up, and using antivirus and adblocking software
- buying some of the frivolous things advertised, after at last being worn down by it, even a bit
- waiting for the page to load
- waiting for computer to run at all, given the heavy load some of our protective software puts on our computers

Obligatory

GMail is a good example of an interface that you don't need to read a user guide first for --- although they do have short articles for those who get stuck. Google in general does user interfaces well. I credit it to: (1) using one-word, plain-English text labels instead of icons (or at least they used to), (2) clean and simple layout (which, by the way, is anything but simple to make) and (3) just a thousand little things to make the user's life easier. For example, while most email programs showed just the subject in the list, GMail showed as much as the message as possible. After all, people are bad at writing subjects. Little things like that, a hundred times over. There's no one big thing that turns it from a bad UI to a good one. It's just lots and lots and lots of polishing.

37Signals at least writes about what I think is the most efficient route to good software. See their book, Getting Real. I haven't used their software much, so I don't know how well they execute, but lots of people like it.

I think you should major in UI and minor in documentation. I think you will always need some documentation. And maybe your software needs a lot. Some software does. And a few of those projects have outstanding documentation. I don't know, see how PostgreSQL keeps theirs up to date.

We've been snydeq rolled. This story was submitted by snydeq, whose every link points to InfoWorld.

I'm taking this quote totally out of context, I know, but I think the idea of The United States, instead of The Large Monolithic Country Spanning This Much People and Land was ingenious. Like anything, it can be abused. No matter how many laws you make, you can't stomp out wickedness. By the way, this was the original meaning phrase, "You can't legislate morality."

I loved school, but I'm for summer break, a generous one from Memorial through Labor Day. In fact I've been mulling whether grown-ups should have summer breaks too, if we could.

School is a narrow, weird world. It readied me in some ways, but in others I was a seedling. There are other ways a child must grow. Playing at home and in the neighborhood, hanging from trees, exploring, etc., are very good for the brain and the heart. Some kids go to camp, whether it be outdoor, sports, music, or whatever. You can't very well spend a month concentrating on a certain field when you have to go to school. I myself wasn't a joiner. I rejected Boy Scouts, band, and all sports. But I made up for it when I discovered moviemaking. In high school I made about 40 movies, short ones, but they had screenplays, multiple camera angles, special effects, editing, the best I could do.

I lament that I no longer have that creativity, and I blame it on the year-round non-stop drudgery that is the American way. Someone once said that a Frenchman told them you need five weeks: one week to get ready, two weeks to go somewhere, and two weeks to recover from vacation. Here we nary get more than week off at a time. There's just never a chance to recharge.

"Unsupported" is the magic word to get huge companies like mine to at last move on. I can't tell you how happy that will make me, an intranet programmer, if my company's official browser is IE 11 or something.

Right now it's 8. It and 7 were wonderful improvements in CSS from IE 6, which our official browser until just a few years ago. I fought with IE 6 for years and it felt like it would it never quite go away. I know that there are some poor souls in the world still using IE 6, but since it's no longer our company's official browser, I don't have to think about it. The thing that made my company finally upgrade was because a vendor forced them to, saying that their web app would no longer work in IE 6.

While IE 7 and 8 brought real improvements in CSS support, JavaScript is quirky until at least 9. Microsoft's unpredictable implementation of JavaScript is part of the reason JavaScript has a shady reputation. If Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari were the only browsers I had to write against, it would have been a different life.

Okay, y'all can stop mentioning how vi and emacs do everything these do plus come preinstalled on Linux systems. From the article:

This is for people moving to a text editor from Word.

I am nonplussed and yet, not nonplussed. Figure that out ;)

It's a good thing most actors aren't good at programming.

Seriously, why do we feel we must constantly reel words, which were perfectly content in their familiar habitat, into the jargonic fold? "Actor"? Couldn't we have used one of dozens of words already used in everyday English: programmers, hackers, thieves, people? That last suggestion brings up another question: which of the two instances of the word "malicious" could safely be removed from the sentence? Both. After a long introduction about a security hole, we're so ready for a scenario about villainy that we would be positively thrown off otherwise. At least they said "could create" and not "could potentially create."

There.

After the lawsuit from Oracle and now this, if I were the one who chose Java as Android's language, I would be kicking myself just about every day now.

I also will always remember it. In my formative junior high years, I took a video class that had among its gear an Amiga 2500, and I tried to make something like a live-action take on Animator's Revenge with Daffy Duck. From the article:

In the hands of an imaginative seventh grader, the Amiga Toaster was a ton of fun. For the same reason, the execution severely lacking, my videos were hard to watch for anyone but family and friends.

You mean Stephen Elop, not Elon Musk. Quite a difference, but I can see myself making the same Elop flip-flop.

I can't wait for this generation to saturate the industry. Fewer bugs, better features, from less nonsense to code programs with. They might even be better as people, with clearer heads. Python might even help you think more clearly.