Back in the day - quite a long way back now, if I'm honest - I always found it a good rule of thumb that if you indent level was deep enough that you were pushing your code off the right hand side of your terminal, you should just pull stuff out into functions. Apparently these new-fangled modern compilers even automatically inline function calls where necessary, so there's no performance hit ..

(I'm sure there are situations where the insane indent is useful and/or necessary, but I can't imagine there are many of them.)

True. NTFS does this, though, and IIRC allows (in the sense that the on-disk structures permit it - don't know if there are any implementations that support it) you to define and index on arbitrary attributes.

That always felt like a bit a design flaw to me, though - requires updating the FILE object (inode) for any change in any of the directories it appears in.

After the ext4 dust-up recently, I think we need a bigger debate about providing alternative types of storage subsystems as a core part of the OS. Traditional filesystems don't do a good job of providing the indexing capabilities that you get with a DBMS, and as the ext4 thing proved, don't do a particularly good job of providing reliability in the face of consumer-grade hardware and "optimistic" application writers. Given that, as discussed elsewhere, they don't seem to do a good job of providing a comprehensible model to end-users either, perhaps it's time to move on to something else.

I've always felt a first step would be to dump filename handling out of the Unix VFS: just store wodges of data with associated inode numbers, and let user space decide what they mean. Replace */bin with a index of inodes that provide commands and names, provide some mechanism for doing the same for app specific data, and then maintain the user's data separately as well. Why should all the config stuff stored in ~/.* appear in my word processor's file chooser (whenever the "hide hidden files" option inexplicably toggles itself behind my back)? It's not relevant, and gives click-happy users too much opportunity to destroy things ..

Arguably a Unix filesystem already is a tagged repository.

In Unix-y filesystems, you don't put files in folders. You put files in the filesystem, where they get a number (inode number). Then you can set up other special files (directories) to act as indices, linking names to the inode number - as many as you want. Voila - nest-able tags (albeit not versioned in most filesystems.)

(Actually, if Unix hadn't insisted on banning '/' and NUL from filenames, a directory could in fact link arbitrary binary data to inode numbers. Bit of a missed opportunity there ..)

Amen. So long as you understand the concepts, it's very easy to learn a new language, or resume using an old one that you haven't touched for a few years. A pocket-sized language quick reference on the desk is sometimes necessary, and perhaps for the useful monstrosity that is C++ you'd actually need a copy of Stroustrup, as there are (far too) many wrinkles, but that's about it.

Incidentally, looking at the original list, C basically is portable assembly..

Outdoor distractions are arguably more purposeful, teaching coordination, balance, navigation, all that stuff.

The two things that bother me about the half-generation or so below me (and probably lots of my peers who I just failed to notice, if I'm honest) are (i) the excessively social side to it, the constant need to be in touch, the complete inability to amuse oneself or develop a personal sense of security, and (ii) the completely artificial nature of most of the amusements, that teach absolutely nothing about the real world. And yes, I know I'm sitting here moaning on the internet, but at least it's on a site for people who are, by-and-large, interested in doing and achieving stuff ..

Let our kids be dreamers, but only after they've done the chores, completed their homework, had dinner, and it's not past 9:00PM.

It's probably possible to overdo this, but letting kids understand (and share in) the basic skills involved in running a household and surviving life as an adult are important. School and homework I'm less sure about - a strongly academic education is a pretty abstract experience (and a weak one is kind of pointless), difficult for kids to connect to real life unless their parents were engineers or particularly practically minded. Personally, I think we should probably teach kids to read, write and add-up, and then get them out into the workplace very young (14?), alongside their parents, and their parents' friends, and their friends' parents, and given them some real world experience, although it would have to be at a pretty menial level. Then when they're 18 or 20 and have some idea of what might interest them, they'd be much more motivated to study .. Of course, this would mean a rather drastic overhaul of pretty much the entire structure of our society - but I'm not sure that would be a bad thing.

You've got to admit though, the idea of a young kid reading under his duvet whilst wielding a flaming brand is rather more dramatic and visually appealing ;-)

Mine was something similar, but a few years earlier on a borrowed ZX Spectrum, and a few months later a BBC B+.

I don't know about you, but there were less "distractions" in my childhood - for example, only 4 TV channels, and I didn't watch that much. I spent a lot of time reading (books) - including under the bed covers with a torch when I wasn't supposed to be.

Modern kids have a lot distractions available - multi-channel TV (usually available in their rooms), PC or console based games, mobiles, the internet .. if we're going to get them hooked, we might have to use something that's more obviously visually appealing, and easier to get into with the systems they already have around them. It might seem depressing (especially to those of us who already feel like old-timers before they've reached 35), but sometimes you have to bend to reality a little.

And on the positive side, they have python available to them to progress to. Beats the crap out of any form of BASIC on the elegance and features front ..

You'd need ELKS on a pre-386 machine.

On the whole, though, his intuitive sense of taste has been for Linux

s/been/been pretty good/

Proof-reading ability falls off with increasing blood alcohol levels, sadly ..

I don't see the problem, to be honest. the toolkit libraries of your apps (by definition running as you) turn requests for widgets into drawing primitives and pixels that need setting in a framebuffer. The X server draws them / sets them. What's the third level of protection protecting you against? Processes memory contents are already protected against each other, the worst the X server might be tricked into doing is reporting the window or clipboard contents of one app to another, which is usually something you want it to be able to do anyway.

There's a possible argument for being able to mark certain X clients as "sandboxed" in the X server, but running the X server as a separate user isn't going to help in that situation - just introduce more complexity.

Linus isn't perfect. His opinions evolve over time. On the whole, though, his intuitive sense of taste has been for Linux, I reckon.

Also, I think KGI wanted to push a lot more into kernel space that we have now, even with kernel mode-setting, though my aging memory may well fail me..

It's a truism: those who do not understand technology are destined to write clueless articles about it, apparently.*

Sorry, feeling particularly bitter and twisted this evening ..

(* or get appointed CTO)

It's backwards to the vast majority of people who never used the network capabilities of X.

Sadly, even when you demonstrate it in these days of Terminal Services / Remote Desktop / VNC, people aren't impressed. The fact that it worked just as well 20 years ago (when it was in fact more use - you generally had a thinner, dumber X terminal, and a choice of minis / servers to do your computation on) passes them by ..

Amen. I'm not generally a big fan of rich capitalists, but this guy saw what needed doing and had a go. I've got a lot of respect for people who actually try to get stuff done rather than just moaning, even if they are still aiming to make money off of it in the long term. With any luck he'll learn some lessons, and be able to use of the hardware, and come back later with a better plan.

I'm not a big fan of the aesthetics of these things either, but I accept their necessity.

Look at it this way - with fugly great wind farms all over the place, we'd have a constant visual reminder of the impact of our energy requirements. More incentive to reduce them than with invisible CO2 emissions and fossil fuel depletion..