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

Western culture, including the pop culture has long suffered from the idea that 'new is good'. This idea naturally was fostered by commercial empires, that depended on this idea to rapidly dismiss old music, movies, clothes for new items, regardless of the intrinsic value of the old products.

It seems that Sony and Universal have pursued this idea to the next step.

Paai

No, I really am a computational linguist with a great interest in power laws as applicable to communication.

Well, I plead guilty to being a computational linguist... but inspired by Zipf and Mandelbrot, I have messed around a lot with all kinds of communication data and generally you need a hundred thousand or more.

I doubt very much that there is enough terrorism-related data to have much confidence in this analysis. You need quantities lijke the number of words in a book to extract with any confidence Zipfs law or most other power laws. Even then, there are enough deviations from the straight line (on logscale, of course) to make the drawing of conclusions a very interesting job indeed.

Paai

To begin with, a sucessor/collaborator for Pratchett would have to be sixtyish, like Pratchett himself (and yours truly). That is because he draws so heavily from his experiences as an very intelligent observer of the second half of the 20th century, including the fifties and sixties. I *know* that my 25 and 28 years old daughters are Pratchett adepts, and I always wonder in how far they get the allusions, and if not, why they can enjoy the books so much.

You mentioned Good Omens, which certainly is one of the best (and which incidentally depends very much on biblical knowledge), but ithat book certainly is not the result of a slick writer taking over from a dead or retiring author.

"Terry Pratchetts Diskworld, in association with X" is a possibility that I did not yet even consider. Some things are too horrific even to think about.

But the day that people so completely lost their cultural roots that Salomon is forgotten, will be a black day indeed.

I *like* Pratchett, but Salomon came first :-)

Hasn't Knuth an award out for everybody who found a bug in TeX? Somebody must have found one :-)