I am struggling with this. As far as I can say that you are saying you looked at a large code base *once* and you found that it was complicated and you didn't understand it.

Is this not true with most code bases? I mean, I can look back at my own code from a while back, and it takes me quite a while to work out what it is doing. And long-lived code bases can, ironically, be particularly problematic.

The ultimate problem here is the funding problem. Free software is much more adaptable because you don't have to tell anyone what you are going to do with it before you do. But someone still has to pay for it at some time. The strange thing is that people and companies have roads coming to their doors which are maintained by the public, but the same is not true of essential software like OpenSSH.

Yep, it's true there are times when prefix notation is painful. I got used to it years ago, though, so it doesn't really bother me any more. For maths, I agree, it confuses but it's easy to drop that, or use a threading operator for non mathematical code. And it largely absolves me from the hassle of having to think about syntax the rest of the time.

Compromises in lisp as in all things.

Pretty sure that kawa is compiled as it happens, so your distinction between haskell and dynamically typed scripting languages is false.

The parenthesis thing is a bonus for kawa, since it enables advanced syntax tree manipulation of source code both in the editing
environment, and for meta programming. And once nice feature of lisp compared to haskell is that you can do basic I/O without spending
three weeks understanding what the hell a monad is.

Long division -- that is where the divisor is a big number. This is not the same as division in general.

There are quite a few ways (too many, which is an Emacs flaw) of achieving Source Browsing. ECB is a nice example, if you like the full windows environment. Mostly, though, I use ido.el and projectile. It's very quick. Indeed, the ability to move between files with extreme rapidity is one of the things that keeps me on Emacs.

The core of Emacs is very stable, and you get used to do things in certain ways. At times, you need to shake things about a bit and investigate new packages. While this comes with a cost, the benefit of Emacs is that the old ways still work. You won't get forced into a new way of working with each new release, if you are happy with the old.

I do that often, as it happens. I often test my lisp in batch, so I run emacs inside a compilation window. I also use Emacs in batch for some builds of things other than Emacs software. For this, I run make which runs emacs inside a compilation window.

There is a widgetized branch of Emacs which lets you use Emacs as a widget and lets you put widgets into Emacs, so you could probably do it graphically if you really wanted.

Not totally convinced that we have a lawless security state, although there was a recent scandal when a police officer was armed during routine policing. Not the sort of thing we really want to see in this country.

This is a silly argument. Democracy is a mechanism for ensuring that a society runs with the consent of the majority. The whole point of society is to put restrictions on what you can and cannot do. This can mean forcing you to do things you do not want. Most of the time, though, it involves stopping a few people from doing things that they want: whether this is murder, or driving too fast.

By your definition of freedom, pretty much everyone in our society is free for the brief period between birth and weaning. After that, it's downhill all the way.

So, patent examiners are employed by we the people, from who they could have nothing to fear. As a result their union is an evil vested interest.

On the other hand, taxes are collected by a vicious and cruel IRS, using the ever present threat of violence and death.

I'm glad that you cleared that up, because I thought it was the same organisation, the government, that both collect tax and employ patent examiners.

He is complaining that there is little room for independence, that everything is becoming owned by large corporations who control everything through a combination of their power in the marketplace, use of the law.

I am struggling to understand how this is an issue with software development. The same is happening everywhere. Once he's been writing for a while, he'll discover that this is mostly owned by a few large corporations. The same is true with music, science, education and so on.

We are sinking back into a "free market" feudal hierarchy. Software development is just following the rest of society.

"Scala also runs on the JVM, so it's fast as opposed to Python."

This is so wide of the mark that I had to comment. The JVM is a fast virtual machine, but that is a poor benchmark. Java and Python run at roughly equitable speeds, but where Python wins out is that it has a much stronger interface to C or Fortran. For hard core number crunching, python wins because you can either call existing scientific or numerical libraries, or use tools like numpy which do the stuff that needs to be fast in C.

Phil

Stability is not the same thing as stagnation! Obviously, it is the same thing as stability.

Slower moving is good sometimes. I can still compile 20 year old documents that I wrote in Latex, but cannot open 20 year old documents that I wrote in word.
"Innovation" is often used to mean "planned obsolescence" where the business model depends on software and hardware being replaced every three or four years.

A lot of the problems with recent desktop systems have also been about change, when it has been affecting things that people use all the time. I'm a scientist so I want to do innovative work on my computer; most of the time, I just need the desktop to get out of my way.

It's all a matter of degree. Stability is not the same thing as stability. Change is not the same thing as innovation.

So, the "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" notion fails. There were not enough eyes on the OpenSSL library, which is why nobody discovered the bug.

Except that someone did discover the bug, when they were looking at the code because it was open source. And they did report it. And it did get fixed. Later than anyone would want of course. But it happened. Maybe the similar errors would and are being missed in the Windows and Mac implementations.

Probably the numbers are real. Since we spent lots of our money on bailing out banks and wars, and big business doesn't pay tax any more, many areas of the public sector have been cut. Most local councils have shed workers wholesale.