OFF-TOPIC...? Sad how one of Terry Pratchetts most beautiful characters is unknown on slashdot. But what can you expect on a Merkin site.

Paai

Ooook. Oook. Ooooook.Eeeek!

paai

Are you serious? Just get a small smartphone and clip to a strap on your underarm when you enter the clean room. I do it under similar circumstances (not a clean room, quite the opposite)

Paai

I was and still am a pretty accomplished C prorammer, and can find my way in assembly. Then C++ came along and everybody seemed to jump on that bandwagon. I couldn't and many of my collegues either. When you have progressed to far along the procedural path, it seems to be impossible to wrap your head around the object oriented paradigma. That is why I also never got into Java.

Paai

WTF is David Hasselhof? Should I know?
(short visit to Google)
Oh, some american actor.

I feel that this is just Ukrainian propaganda and has no place in Slashdot.

Paai

The phrase "hacking hands" suddenly acquires a lot more meaning...

Paai

If we fall back to the technological level of the middle ages, kickstarting a new 20th-century like civilization is impossible. To create such a civilization, you need energy. Almost all resources like coal and oil have depleted to the point that you need a very complex society to win them. But to exploit sun or wind energy on a sufficient scale, you also need the resources of a large technology pyramid.

Again, if you want to keep individuals to try and recreate our technology, you need a society with a certain level of sophistication so that you can afford people that do not directly work for food prodution.

Catch 22.

Finally, if you want to cut all possible corners in research and production, you need a very strong central governement that keeps the focus on those developments. That will not be possible without a fascistoid state.

Perhaps we should take care to avoid bringing our civilization down.

Paai

As some other people already remarked, on the face of it this looks like the venerable Unix approach of small tools in a script. My point is that the real world outside, that you are trying to capture in a programming language, can be very complicated. For some domains, e.g. logic or arithmetics, the language can be pretty complicated too - see APL, LISP or Prolog.

But in thirty years of programming (computational linguistiscs), I have found that Unix scripts, awk and plain C covered pretty much 90% of (my) programming needs. If and when necessary I tacked on a larger database system. Of course I tried the new (well, in the nineties they were new) OO systems, but I rapidly got lost in a jungle of libraries and methods and even more documentation. Compare that to the almost ascetic (and aesthetic) clarity of the Unix environment.

Yes, I feel that Unix still has a lot of mileage in it and intentionally or not, this item and the reactions on it, confirm me in this view

Paai

I agree 150%. Much as I like KDE and Kubuntu, my strong advice would be a complete feature freeze an concentrate on all the bugs. Every new distribution has dozens of applications unexpectedly misbehaving, many of them are not fixed after updates that themselves introduce other problems again...for gods sake first fix all the broken stuff. I more than once mailed this to the K-people, but they do not even answer.

Paai

Does nobody read discworld any more? Where ants act as bits in a magical computer?
Paai

Excuse me, but isn't this just a rehash of what Macluhan already stated some fifty years ago?
Paai

So far nobody mentioned 'the space merchants' by Pohl and Kornbluth, somewhere late fifties early suxties. Convincing story about consumerism and marketing run wild.

Paai

Since nobody mentioned 'the king must die' as yet, I will.
Paai