The Bandwidth of Code:
Hell is Other People's Code is, perhaps, another way of saying that code is a terrible way to communicate with other human beings. Foreign code inspires a mixture of apprehension, anger and anxiety precisely because the bandwidth capacity of written code is so horrifying small. Enormous amounts of context, nuance, philosophy, history -- in short, knowledge -- is lost forever each time we try to translate our ideas and desires into program code. And this tremendous loss of knowledge looks to be unavoidable.
Since even Knuth has given up on literate programming as a general solution to this kind of problem, let me throw another possibility out there: Version control. It's not perfect, but you can get into someone's head by reading their mistakes and false tries in their version control history.
This is why rebasing is bad. But also why it appeals to so many developers, who have no desire to let you inside their head.
Steve Yegge
Steve is very quotable. From Xemacs is dead, Long live Xemacs:
XEmacs should drop out of the race
At this point it's becoming painful to watch. GNU Emacs is getting all the superdelegates. That warmonger VIM is sitting back and laughing at us. But XEmacs just won't quit!
And has some deep insights into the mind of an emacs user. From the Pinocchio Problem:
Viewed from a radical, yet possibly defensible perspective, a reboot is a murder.
And some things that ring true (or at least provide another excuse for not learning haskell properly). Also from the Pinocchio Problem:
There's nothing wrong with static type systems. You just have to realize that when you use them, you're building hardware, not software.
Best of all they're in these enormous long blog-rants of chapter length that discuss a topic in depth, then go out the other side. Great fun, even if you disagree with him.
sad end
Reiser is guilty of first-degree murder, the jury has found.
He killed Nina with premeditation and deliberation and now faces 25 years to life in prison.
Pressed to elaborate, Du Bois said, "I'm sure he negatively impressed the jurors."
Hans also mostly negatively impressed me the one time I met him (and the one time I emailed him). And the whole business of hiring Russian programmers to slave away at a filesystem with your name on it has always struck me as shady and disenfranchising.
But, after reading Rick's excellent summaries of every day of the trial, I still have no idea if Reiser killed his wife, and indeed no clue if she's dead at all, or instead back in Russia with the children.