> I think this entire discussion suffers from survivor bias: those who advocate strongly for Fortran have not given serious consideration to anything else.

I've just honestly never heard of OO being used anywhere, where it wasn't a crutch for bad programmers; with again, the appeal to modernity fallacy being used to justify it.

I consider computer programming in its' current form, to very largely be a field in serious decline, and ruled by baseless hubris, to be honest. That is also the reason why I'm so wary of the appeal to modernity. Most of the time in my observation, newer methods are actually markedly inferior to older ones, rather than an improvement.

I think a big part of the reason for this, is because the emphasis is constantly on reducing programmer effort. What nobody seems to remember, however, is that needing to apply effort, is how you become good at something.

So we now have spoon-fed, degenerate Millenials, awash in cheap CPU cycles and coding in C++. They don't need to learn efficiency; they don't need to learn how to do things truly well. The complexity of the software they write, also perpetuates their delusions that they are skilled at what they do; when the truth is the exact opposite.

And that was a shame, because many new generations of scientific programmers did not get exposed to new languages with new expressive power (such as OO) that could solve new problems.

I've only ever seen two groups of people, who advocated OO as some sort of inherent virtue in itself.

a} Psychopathic, buzzword-obsessed, clueless IT managers.

b} Elitist, equally clueless programmers, who mainly advocate OO and related languages, (such as C++) because they enjoy ego tripping about the fact that they can write code that nobody else is able to read, rather than actually getting real work done.

The main argument that both groups use to advocate OO, is the appeal to modernity fallacy. I.e., the idea that "modernity," is an inherent virtue, purely for its' own sake.

While a lot of numerical specialists who aren't computer scientists still code in FORTRAN (or MATLAB or Python with NumPy), most cutting-edge research for large scale parallelism, heterogeneous computing and high performance computing is done in C or C++.

You have just confirmed something, which I have suspected for a while. Namely, that C++ is the programming language of choice for psychopaths; and given that IT managers are also usually psychopaths, that explains why so many programmers are forced to use it.

Whether you love, hate, or are ambivalent about >systemd, I think you have to accept it at this point.

There's something called individuality. Some of us have it. If you don't, then that's a shame; but that is not going to prevent us from retaining ours.

We are under no obligation to simply shut up and accept systemd whatsoever. We can go to FreeBSD. We can go to Minix. We have any number of possible alternatives.

Linus deserves recognition for the amount of work he has done; but as an operating system, Linux in my mind has always demonstrated the difference between popularity and quality. I wholeheartedly felt that Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson deserved the awards they received; but where Linus is concerned, I'm more ambivalent.

For me, Linux is popular , while *BSD is actually good. I can't motivate myself to install a Linux distribution, these days, and for two reasons.

a} In technical terms, I know of no distro in existence, which has close to the same level of overall quality as the BSDs. Comparitive Linux distributions are invariably a bloated, disorganised, opaque mess.

b} Linux developers are socially toxic, hubristic, juvenile adolescents; who are persistently unrepentant about the degree to which their code sucks. I would laugh about said developers' near-mindless obsession with modernity and false "innovation" purely for its' own sake, if said attitude did not make me so angry. Massive changes are made to the system, just because . Changes are not made with any real consideration for whether or not said changes are actually a good idea, but rather because any change is apparently seen as somehow being better than none at all. It is a completely irrational attitude.

I probably should not let my level of disgust with the current state of Linux as a whole, cloud my enthusiasm about Linus being recognised for his genuine tenacity and brilliance as a programmer. I've said before that the .01 release of the kernel was absolute poetry; but then, tragically, over the years both the Windows refugees and the cultic, authoritarian Leftist FSF vermin moved in, and the rest became history.

Linus should strongly consider riding off into the proverbial sunset before too long, I feel. Let him go out on a high note, and let history remember him favourably, before the malevolence of the likes of Lennart Poettering contaminates his legacy.

When will Dr. Evil be told to clean out his desk? You might not have figured out who the company's main liability is, yet; but the rest of us have known for years, now.

By the way, Windows 8 sucks; and although I intended XP to be my last Microshaft operating system, (after which I would have migrated to FreeBSD) thanks to the UEFI standard that you and the rest of the consortium of corporate supervillains implemented, that is no longer possible for me. If I want to use FreeBSD at all on new hardware these days, and I want full hardware support, I'm stuck doing so in vmWare under Windows.

Insincerely yours,
Petrus

a} Clueless psychopathic suits in management, who make impossible schedule demands, and have no programming background themselves.

b} The use of popular, but garbage programming languages. C++, PHP and Perl are probably the main three culprits here. Dishonourable mention also goes to XML, JavaScript, and the XHTML Document Object Model. I have never encountered a "Web application," yet, which wasn't a disorganised, bloated, CPU hogging abomination.

For the last two months I've been economically forced to use a dual core 1.5 ghz laptop with 2 gb of RAM, and it can only barely keep up with the inefficient, JavaScript-infested obscenity that the Web has become. Virtually none of said JavaScript ever provides truly valuable functionality, either; most of it is just trackers of various kinds.

It's also purely due to Capitalism; all of it. Why have Red Hat had Lennart try and force systemd, GNOME, and the rest of their corporate crapware on Linux users? Their desire for a corporate monopoly, that's why.

What caused the UNIX wars? Corporations wanting to add their own non-standard extensions, to ensure their coveted Unique Selling Positions.

We must get rid of the suits.

There are times when transhumanists cause me to wax seriously nostalgic, for that magical bygone era, when society's answer to potentially extinction-inducing abominations, was to build a large, blazing pile of logs, and place the freak of nature in question, exactly at the center of it.

In most cases of course, when Muslims indulge in this type of behaviour, I consider it as barbaric and uncivilised as anyone else, but for some reason I'm willing to make an exception where transhumanism is concerned. There's just something about human/machine integration, and the erosion of privacy and control of our basic biological functions as a result, that causes me to want to reach for a torch and pitchfork.

Yeah, because its realistic for people to be their own code auditors for a whole OS, and for each install and update. It is entirely realistic if you know what you are doing. My default FreeBSD install fits into 65 Mb of RAM. As I have observed before on this site many times; narrow mindedness and aggression have a marked tendency to go together. The more ignorant a person is, the more adamant they usually are about expressing it. Not all of us live according to argumentum ad novitatem.

My last few remaining microns of sympathy for Linux, evaporated not long ago when I read Lennart Poettering encouraging everyone around him, to throw POSIX under the bus. I'm aware that Linux developers have viewed the system's relationship with older UNIX, in roughly the same manner as a venereal disease since probably 2000; in a sense, it surprised me that it took that long for someone to actually come out and say it openly.

Linux has completely gone to shit; and not in the "yes it causes me to rage, but I'm still putting up with it," sense, but the "I now feel so much contempt and disgust for it that I've washed my hands, and can no longer be remotely bothered," sense.

Linux's developers these days, are a bunch of ivory tower elitists, who in reality have no idea what they are doing, but who have the attitude that everyone else using the system can just shut up and take what they are given, and if the rest of us don't like it, then that is just too damn bad. Lennart Poettering, again, is the main offender when it comes to this sort of thinking, but it has also always characterised the GNOME developers as well.

GNOME should have been recognised as a mess, and rewritten from scratch, before Canonical got hold of it. The problem there is that you have people who are using Microsoft Windows as their template, and so they think that making everything opaque and hard welded together, is somehow the "professional," way to do things. Graphical user interfaces don't *need* to be a bloated pile of shit; it's just that Windows is, and Linux people now are determined to copy Windows.

I've been learning about FORTH, recently; and about the idea of (in languages which are designed for it, at least) writing one function per file, and having said function consist of no more than 500 bytes each. FORTH was the product of an era in which programmers actually knew what they were doing; unlike today, when computer science graduates emerge from university with their heads densely packed full of bovine fecal matter, such as the idea that programs should be as long and complex as possible, rather than short and simple.

But there's no point. There's no point arguing with any of you. You'll just mod me down, and tell me that Ubuntu is great, and GNOME is superb, and Poettering is a genius. So go ahead. Have fun.

Please don't use the citation needed troll. Yes, the person you're responding to is a fairly typical brainwashed American, but that response implies that you are someone who doesn't believe anything, unless it comes to them second-hand.

You wouldn't want us to think that, would you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI4O8byPw7g

Your comment caused me to go and look this song up, and listen to it. ;)

Assange was chosen because of his sociopathic personality.

Agreed. Assange is a melodramatic narcissist. As much as he might be railing about the fact that the film will portray him negatively, I can assure everyone here that he probably also masturbates on a regular basis, to the thought that anyone associated with the government has made a film about him at all.

Assange is an archetypical grey hat. I used to know a few of them on IRC in the mid to late 1990s. They are sociopathic vermin, and completely without any vague semblance of honour; but because of the dependence we now have on computers, they think they are God.

If you are wondering whether or not to view either Assange or Snowden as legitimate, then I can tell you one very important detail. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, becomes prominent, viral, or in any way noticed on the Internet by accident. It never happens. "Organic," or grassroots Internet publicity is a lie. The only reason why anyone like Assange or Snowden becomes well known, is because it is arranged by the psychopaths. They want you to believe that anyone can become known, but I can assure you that the opposite is true. If you want publicity, you can't afford to seriously offend anyone, because you want the big people and the psychopaths to spend money on getting fake YouTube views for you, and all of the other dirty tactics they use.

You have to be a complete sellout morally, and you also have to be someone who they will find useful in some way. If you have both of those characteristics, then yes, they will make you famous; but they will also own you, and they will destroy you if you do anything that they do not like.

...is the fact that while Americans condemn Islamic barbarity, their own society is quite literally the most degenerate in human history.

The emphasis is different, of course. Islam focuses on preservation of the collective, or society, at the expense of the individual. America focuses on the preservation of the individual, at the expense of the collective.

Both are imbalanced; but what I find distressing is the fact that, as usual, Americans are only capable of identifying what is wrong with other cultures, rather than acknowledging the fact that, in many cases, entirely equally pathological elements exist within their own.

You might not have judges handing out sentences like this, no; but you do have school and shopping center shootings. The end result is inhumanity, either way.

Inclusion of women in everything, entirely for its' own sake, is politically correct at the moment. We need to take that kind of prevailing bias into account, when reading about "research," like this.

There have been numerous female authors who've written revisionist history in a number of other areas, such as historical witch burning and the influence of women in paleolithic societies in other areas. Most of it is unfalsifiable at best, and garbage at worst.

Do not believe any scientific research which claims results that are consistent with prevailing social biases. The reason why, is because such research is unfalsifiable, by definition. You cannot prove whether or not said bias was not involved, in obtaining the result.