But to anyone who has ever wondered whether using m4 macros to configure autoconf to write a shell script to look for 26 Fortran compilers in order to build a Web browser was a bit of a detour, Brooks…

Today’s Unix/Posix-like operating systems, even including IBM’s z/OS mainframe version, as seen with 1980 eyes are identical; yet the 31,085 lines of configure for libtool still check if <sys/stat.…

This is commonly believed, but in fact, a type checker introduces bugs.  It shifts the cost of a certain class of mistakes so much that the kinds of mistakes people make in the presence of a type chec…

the number of software packages that help people read mail and news and waste enormous amount of time in front of the computer are legion, but they tend to make people spend /more/ time on these tasks…

As for the argument that unit testing can replace strong typing, consider the common refactoring practice in strongly typed languages: changing the type of an argument of a particular function http:/…

Franz Kafka’s character, Gregor Samsa, breaks the type system when he metamorphoses into a giant bug, and we all know how it ends. http://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/11/24/types-and-functions/…

This is honestly the kind of crappy advice that has me paying little to no attention to the Haskell community any longer. A noisy subsdt of silly people has collectively gone nuts for abstractions tha…

hellrealreal http://xach.com/naggum/articles/[email protected]…

correctlyquickly http://xach.com/naggum/articles/[email protected]…

(However, we should keep in mind that having more features is a contributory factor: the two latest holes were in the mremap(2) call that is not available for any of the *BSD.) https://wiki.debian.or…

Well-Intentioned Developer: “When would Rails be appropriate, then?” Ben Sigelman: If you already know how to get things done in Rails, you’re in a hurry, you don’t need to maintain what you’re build…

Unix has a limited form of garbage collection. Short-running programs (like those executed at the terminal) need not concern themselves with freeing allocated memory since the OS will free everything…