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And again a link for which the only interest is the short, attracting and more or less controversial title.

by gnoupi 17y ago

mechanical_fish 17y ago
I read the title in the spirit of the classic Unix-Haters Handbook: It is both tongue-in-cheek and brutally honest at exactly the same time. Though much of the suckage which inspired the the Unix-Haters Handbook has been fixed... or at least finessed [1]... it's still the case that there are aspects of Unix that suck. But of course that doesn't matter. Unix isn't going anywhere fast. It has outlived many of its alternatives, and the remaining alternatives are either worse or have little traction. None of the Unix-Haters were under any illusions about this: They would point out various features that were done better in other operating systems (old-school Mac OS, Windows, OS/2, perhaps even the Commodore Amiga though I don't remember that, and of course the late, lamented Lisp machine) but none of them seriously thought that any of these things had a chance in hell of unseating Unix, just as I suspect that jgc does not seriously think that Javascript will be replaced anytime soon. Javascript and the DOM, like Unix, isn't something that was designed by a rational committee of experts, but it snuck up on all of us and is now ubiquitous, and the social and economic forces that built it in the first place will not let it disappear easily. To paraphrase Crockford, we should all thank god that JS is as good a system as it is, given the inauspicious conditions that surrounded its birth. But I'm perfectly prepared to hear jgc's argument that its security problems are so dire that you can't really fix them while still calling the result "Javascript". That's important information. The first step in working through a hopeless situation is to understand the size and shape of the hopeless part. --- [1] Or, let's face it, in some cases we've all just joined hands, smiled, and agreed to love the suckage. It's the industry standard!
borism 17y ago
really? the only interesting part of presentation you found to be the title? it was quite opposite for me - very interesting examples/proposals he has there under inflammatory attention-seeking title...
mahmud 17y ago
It was a very interesting article. My eyes popped approx every 1.5 pages.

And again a link for which the only interest is the short, attracting and more or less controversial title.

by gnoupi 17y ago

And again a link for which the only interest is the short, attracting and more or less controversial title.

I read the title in the spirit of the classic Unix-Haters Handbook: It is both tongue-in-cheek and brutally honest at exactly the same time. Though much of the suckage which inspired the the Unix-Haters Handbook has been fixed... or at least finessed [1]... it's still the case that there are aspects of Unix that suck. But of course that doesn't matter. Unix isn't going anywhere fast. It has outlived many of its alternatives, and the remaining alternatives are either worse or have little traction. None of the Unix-Haters were under any illusions about this: They would point out various features that were done better in other operating systems (old-school Mac OS, Windows, OS/2, perhaps even the Commodore Amiga though I don't remember that, and of course the late, lamented Lisp machine) but none of them seriously thought that any of these things had a chance in hell of unseating Unix, just as I suspect that jgc does not seriously think that Javascript will be replaced anytime soon. Javascript and the DOM, like Unix, isn't something that was designed by a rational committee of experts, but it snuck up on all of us and is now ubiquitous, and the social and economic forces that built it in the first place will not let it disappear easily. To paraphrase Crockford, we should all thank god that JS is as good a system as it is, given the inauspicious conditions that surrounded its birth. But I'm perfectly prepared to hear jgc's argument that its security problems are so dire that you can't really fix them while still calling the result "Javascript". That's important information. The first step in working through a hopeless situation is to understand the size and shape of the hopeless part. --- [1] Or, let's face it, in some cases we've all just joined hands, smiled, and agreed to love the suckage. It's the industry standard!

borism 17y ago

really? the only interesting part of presentation you found to be the title? it was quite opposite for me - very interesting examples/proposals he has there under inflammatory attention-seeking title...

mahmud 17y ago

It was a very interesting article. My eyes popped approx every 1.5 pages.