Odd, I thought it was exactly the opposite. Linux doesn't interpret the names at all. Only '\0' and '/' (in C/C++ notation) are treated specially by Linux in what can be allowed as file name. The rest is just an array of bytes. Is Mac OS X or Windows the ones that try (and I said try, since I'm not sure they achieve it) to protect the user from security and confusion problems. Is not just case sensitivity, think of pre-composed characters, for example (distinguishing modified+character from character already modified). See the interesting conversation after a Git release, where several developers explain the problems on the normalization that Mac OS X does.

And the source being distrowatch, a website for people looking for a distribution. Maybe it confirms that users of Ubuntu don't want to change distro? Or for people who don't even know what a distro is? Or who don't speak English?

Signed: a Debian user who complained a lot about Ubuntu on several levels.

And the designers of Ruby also suggest that you don't create complex class hierarchies. And the designers of Java created interfaces to avoid complex class hierarchies. Maybe the problem are complex class hierarchies, or trying to solve everything with OOP when you should not?

Let me quote from the biggest myths:

Maybe the example was too subtle, but for sure there are some things from /etc/sysconfig that are gone from Red Hat, and are substituted by Debian-style configuration.

Odd that of all possible choices, systemd developers chose almost always a way that is exactly the same or very similar to what Debian does. For example, I don't see stuff like /etc/sysconfig, while I do see things like /etc/hostname etc.

Sorry, but I completely agree with the story explained. My previous employer gave me an email address managed by Google Apps. I subscribed and posted to about 3-4 different open source project mailing lists. Obviously that's enough to make your address well known to spammers.

The amount of email in the spam folder was surprisingly high, given that my very personal email address, which has appeared during a decade (not just two years) on online archives of about 20 times more lists, receives a little bit less. But that's not bad. What I found insulting is that they had plenty of false positives. That's the worse kind of error in email filtering: you check your inbox more often, and is not a big deal deleting one additional email a day. But I found email threads of those mailing lists broken when because parts of a thread (just parts of a freaking mailing list thread!) were marked as spam, and was autoexpired (yes, I don't need to check all mailing lists that often). It also marked as spam one reply to an email I sent. A shame.

And yes, I used the "this is not spam" feature, but I got bored. The best I could do was reviewing all the filters to completely skip the spam filtering, which is stupid anyway in many mailing lists that require a legitimate address to subscribe, which yields a very low spam rate (besides the "join me in my linkedin network" that some stupid sent to the whole address book).

You were implying that using a subset of C++ features is not practical because you could "write C++ that is not guaranteed to be maintainable by anybody short of a complete master", which is absurd, because only a complete master could write that kind of unmaintainable code. Well, according to your logic and your subjectivity, there are only a small amount of people capable of that feat. And the fact that there are lots of C++ programs and libraries out there that are maintainable proves it.

You can not even identify one without resorting to factual mistakes. I'm running every day lots of programs written in C++. A simple search on a linux distro reveal thousands of packages in C++. Is that maintained by those "single to double digits" amount of people in the world? Sure.

Well, he has given that answer several times. On his FAQ, he says:

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses". Yes. Again, I very much doubt that the sentiment is original. Of course, all "there are only two" quotes have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Any practical example to back it up? Probably there are some cases of that, but the contrary is IMHO more common. One of the most popular C++ library out there, Qt, doesn't make you learn exceptions, and templates are only used for containers, so you rarely see one of those scary compilation errors.

That means that in practice, you see large C++ codebases that are very easy to grasp. At my current workplace, all C++ developers barely understand C++ outside the C subset, and projects work fine from the customer perspective. Do they understand that each time they pass a value to a function they are copying it, and that it can be costly? No, but luckily they are doing that with QByteArray, which is implicitly shared. They don't have to understand the feature. Besides me they don't even know it exists, but it works, and saves the day.

Funny that you mention that, because systemd exposes lots of features through cgroups and a nice filesystem on /sys. And to use systemd's journal's files, the documentaion already explains that you just open the files, memory map them, and use inotify, a classic notification API on files...

C++ does no garbage collection because C++ developers learn how not to produce garbage in the first place. Use proper mutex lockers, smart pointers or file handles, and you won't leak memory, won't miss freeing locks or file descriptors.

And is not that you need to be a genius to make use of them. Just use, for example, a QFile, or QMutexLocker, and at the end of the scope the resource is freed. Done.

I'm surprised by your answer at so many levels. First, I thought the guys doing scientific calculations were scientists that many times (not always of course) are only used to Matlab, Mathematica or even Excel. Second, obviously we will need native code, as well as interpreted, functional, and lots of code in domain specific areas (what the heck... I spent this Sunday morning writing in VimL, a language so stupid that can't copy a file without reading the whole contents in memory or invoking system(), but I needed to program in that and there is no way around it).

But the final sentence of the article isn't targeted at people doing heavy lifting. Is an "attack" at Google's Native Client (NaCl). I peeked at NaCl, and you needed a some set up and some APIs to run some native code invoked from the browser. ASM.js is way simpler, since is just a subset of JavaScript, and has much more possibilities of being followed by vendors like Opera or even Microsoft.

Oh, and, I do native code for a living, and while I would kill for making my code faster, my manager would kill for making me finish projects earlier. :-) Native code is awesome, but sometimes dumb languages are more business successful if you can use all your developers in a project, including that 50% that, by definition, are below the average.

You are missing an important point: many people that work on a software project in their spare time do it to have fun. I work as a programmer for a living, and at work I do what my employer wants me to do. I might not like the way I have to do things at work, but I do as my manager says.

If I work on a hobby project to have fun, I want to do things the way that make me happy. It might be the case that you are happy making a killer product that has tons of users, even if the internals are crap. Or it might be the case that you are only happy with something that has a nice architecture and uses bleeding edge technologies, even if that makes the product unstable an unpopular.

I don't know what is the state of Kdenlive and the opinion of Jean-Baptiste Mardelle, but I hope you know better if you make such assumptions about other's projects.

Yes, I saw that earlier this morning, but I wonder how legal is that, and how easily you can be blocked by Google. I doubt is a solution for a vendor.