Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers – Eben Moglen…

There are grave economic reasons making any progress unlikely while undisciplined programmers generate huge amount of capital. It’s analogous to the programmer whose terrible spaghetti code gives him…

It's interesting to see what music the baby sleeps to. Various successes so far include the Coraline soundtrack and the Ride of the Valkyries (!)…

When I eventually pull myself away from the programming equivalent of navel gazing, I find myself in a familiar, but unappealing, situation: I have a functioning, but incomplete system, and I need to…

From a practical point of view, I suspect that many functions would claim to raise so many different exceptions that the user would be overwhelmed http://tratt.net/laurie/blog/entries/how_can_c_progr…

Ironically, rent control is exactly why there is so little housing available in SF. Iirc, only 30% of the voting population owns property. So how is it that the rest of us (70%) don’t vote to build mo…

The press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. … There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma a…

If you first design your software to near-perfection and then find coding it to be tedious because no problems remain to be solved, I recommend that you obtain a thing called a “compiler” to do the co…

You want to know why startups are thriving off making iFart apps? Because standardization has killed true innovation and left us with the only thing to do is optimize the little stuff. https://news.y…

The preprocessor is a feature of C because C lacks so many features that the preprocessor is needed. Nobody cared to include tools in C++ to make the preprocessor obsolete, so it still lurks around an…