And hey, Slack 15 is out! If they do a new release they won't need to release again for another 6 years!

They do appear to be badly written on purpose, like this "hotdog-aboutDrives.pl" one:

https://github.com/arthurchoung/HOTDOG/blob/master/hotdog-ab...

The entire script is this:

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  $str = `df`;
  print $str;

" Most tutorials about Perl will tell you to always 'use strict' or something to that effect. However, the general rule for HOT DOG Linux is to not 'use strict'. The reasoning behind this is that each Perl script should be as simple as possible. It should be simple enough to not need 'use strict'. If it gets to the point where the script would be easier to deal with if it did 'use strict', then that is an indicator that the script is too complicated and should be broken up."

I tried to come up with a comparison for this but failed. It's sort of like saying, "If you need to wear a helmet to do some activity, you should probably ......... break up the activity into three shorter activities ........."

Unix was built using an extremely unsafe language. Yet it reached a decent level of reliability in just a few years, a lot of which was owed to the system applications being small programs isolated into separate processes.

Out of curiosity, what would the name of the metric for measuring this tradeoff be? Average lines of code per script/program? Average scripts/programs to accomplish a given task?

I feel like it'd be really good to talk more about this tradeoff, e.g. having smart programs that do a lot but are bloated (OpenVPN, OpenSSL, Docker all come to mind) versus smaller programs that do less, but chain together (most GNU tools with the piping mechanism) and the extreme ends of this scale.

Yet, i don't even know how much research has been done into this, what the status quo is and what terms to even look up. It's like talking about the difference between a monolith application or a microservices application, an abstraction that would be applied to tasks and the ways to do them, much like we have SLoC or cyclomatic complexity in regards to reasoning about code (though neither is exactly perfect either).

Composeability requires many different interfaces, but not every solution needs composeability.

Debugging complexity is reduced also because if something causes an abnormal termination, only the containing utility will die, not the entire composition.

We need a new schema language with the ability to specify such cross-format …formats.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/datapower-gateway/10.0.1?topic=2...

  ["Name", "Session", "Score", "Completed"]
  ["Gilbert", "2013", 24, true]
  ["Alexa", "2013", 29, true]
  ["May", "2012B", 14, false]
  ["Deloise", "2012A", 19, true]

The problem is S-Expresssions is still pretty niche where as JSON support is widespread and supporting jsonlines when you already support JSON is trivial.

If you’re old enough to be a LISPer then you should be old enough to realise that there’s always going to be a multitude of competing standards and sometimes we have to make pragmatic choices.

The biggest advantage is that 1 line = 1 record, so you can use unix tools like head, tail, grep, sed to work on it.

It's also easy to sync state in case of errors, since a newline always means record boundary.

In CSV and normal JSON a record can span multiple lines,which sucks, so you almost always have to write custom code to work on them.

ingy and I came up with p3rl.org/JSONY as a "JSON with less ceremony" compromise that I often find useful (it has a PEG grammar that's a superset of JSON so pretty easy to re-implement elsewhere)

I also don’t like space (char 32) used as a field delimiter because that opens up entire categories of bugs that are already a daily annoyance for shell scripting.

I respect your thought processes but I can see this particular specification being more confusing than productive to most other people.

I use it basically like:

  { key1 value1 key2 [ value2a value2b value2c ] }

Plus because JSONY isn't at all indentation sensitive pasting chunks of JSON in becomes IMO a lot easier to comprehend.

A valuable thing for me is that if e.g. I'm writing a daemon that communicates via newline delimited JSON over a TCP or UNIX socket I can have a development mode where it uses JSONY as the parser so it's faster/easier to do quick interactive tests with socat.

   { key1: value1, key2: [ value2a, value2b, value2c ] }

You are much too kind to the monkeys who put this together. The config is nice, but Chicago? Chicago font? I thought that was buried deep, long ago.

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-exterior-shop-front-of-cop...

Not so great kerning though.

I do like the font though. It's a bit like the Plan9 font, it just feels comfortable.

I’m toying with the idea of purely black and white themes so I can use them on my eInk screens, too, pity there’s so little time.

Horrible? Were these not the cutting edge? Do we not hark back to these UIs with fondness for their simplicity and 'it just works'?

The biggest issues with these old environments is that today we are used to much higher screen resolutions, but a modern WM with a classic look would be pretty good for me (and of course with themes you can mostly do just that).

Someone with taste!

Was not ready to see Mac OS X in a retro computing list. I feel old.

Cooperative multitasking has gotten a lot better these days, though, in the form of coroutines and async io.

Maybe you weren't around to witness the instability of cooperative multitasking under both classic MacOS and Windows 3.1/95, or you've forgotten.

Folks who enjoy this may also like NsCDE: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

Like... It's a hot dog. Like code version of lips and asses

I'm trying to think of what's still running in objective-c since the 90s outside of legacy iphone apps and it's SOGo [1]

[1] https://www.sogo.nu/

https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-ho...

There's a difference between being ugly and being broken.

amiwm is still packaged in at least Debian, and just firing it up in a Xephyr window is pretty nostalgic.

¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiwm

² https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardent_Window_Manager

Sounds like my PHP stuff in 2022. Sorry, not sorry, just works. :-D

https://www.malavida.com/en/soft/hotdog-professional/

https://github.com/arthurchoung/HOTDOG/tree/master/MainMenu https://github.com/arthurchoung/HOTDOG/blob/master/objects/o... https://github.com/arthurchoung/HOTDOG/blob/master/objects/o...

When I think of TempleOS I think that it was both strange and funny. It was the artistic creation of a mentally ill programmer. I still think that, if it made me and other people laugh at times, that's a small positive thing. I wasn't laughing at the creator, but the small religious minigames in TempleOS cracked me up at times.

Linus Tech Tips reviews TempleOS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtlyeDAJR7A

If so, he shares that trait with plenty of people in the US, who increasingly view "racial blindness" as untenable. Of course it's not their fault either: "noticing" race is simply a very successful, self-replicating memetic parasite which can leverage the likes of Twitter or 4chan equally as platforms for its spread.

Its not that one needs to be blind to "race", and who could be blind to differences in skin colour? Its that Americans seem to be taught that it is so very important, and that instead of applying situational relevancy, they default to cultural relevancy.

So race and skin colour gets mentioned all the time, even by people who aren't bigoted. This can be seen in their news broadcasts, where they will find or make premise for mentioning brown people's ancestry, even when it isn't truly relevant.

Kid rescues puppy from sewer drain? Gotta mention that he's African American. Never mind that there he is on camera, and anyone can see, and shouldn't care. And thus morality is tied to visual appearance.

In that sense, US society is like the TempleOS guy, who, possibly not even due to his mental illness, needed to squeeze references to his faith into every digital corner.

I'm Australian, born in the 1980s, spent my whole life here. I can tell you growing up we rarely (if ever) thought about "who is what race". In part it is a cultural thing – in my lifetime, official Australian society (government/media/etc) has discouraged talk of "races", encouraging people to instead identify via finer-grained nationality/ethnicity/culture labels – i.e. "Chinese" or "Indian" or "Vietnamese" not "Asian", "Irish" or "Italian" or "Polish" not "white", etc. The whole "who is what race" thing sounds very American to my ears. I believe that way of thinking is becoming more common here, as Australia becomes more Americanised through social media and other sources, but I'm not inclined to see that as a positive development.

That's not to say there is no problem with racism in contemporary Australia. I remember at my high school, there was a significant minority of students of Lebanese ancestry (it was a Catholic high school, so our ethnically Lebanese students were predominantly Maronite Catholics) – and I definitely remember hearing some mildly prejudiced things said about them, even to their faces. But, in all that, I doubt anybody was ever asking themselves "are Lebanese people white?"

One of my school friends, who is of partial Italian descent (albeit via Argentina/Uruguay rather than directly), had to put up with dumb jokes at school about his dad being in the Mafia. He told me how when his father first moved to Australia in the 1970s, his coworkers would exploit his poor knowledge of English to trick him into saying offensive things to the boss. What "race" are my friend and his dad? The question seems pointless, irrelevant. At least here in Australia, "racism" is generally defined as prejudice on the basis of "race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin" – so it isn't necessary to categorise a person as belonging to any particular "race" to acknowledge them as a victim of racism.

How then does one describe this difference between the US and Australia – between a society which strongly (and maybe even increasingly strongly) focuses on coarse-grained racial categories, and a society which (in recent decades) has had a strong tendency towards avoiding them? Maybe "racial blindness" isn't quite the right term for it, but it seems at least somewhat adjacent.

And there is really no biological justification. Skin color does not correlate with genetic differences, in other words two people with different skin colors can be much more similar to two other people with the same.

That doesn't mean that there isn't racism and I'm not sure if a country like Australia has "racial blindness" (whatever that means). Australia has huge issues with xenophobia and attitudes which would be called racist in the US are widespread, they just don't focus on race but on ethnicity instead (which IMO is a much better term)

I completely agree Australia has serious issues with xenophobia, and ethnicity-based racism – indeed, my comment to which you are replying mentioned some examples I've witnessed first-hand: anti-Italian prejudice and anti-Lebanese prejudice. But those don't fit well into an American understanding of "racism" which focuses on race rather than ethnicity.

I suppose my point about "blindness" is this – if by it someone means "I don't see prejudice/discrimination/xenophobia/etc", then I agree that is problematic. On the other hand, if someone says "I'm not sure what races are, how many there are, or who is what race; cases of prejudice/discrimination/xenophobia I have personally observed can be understood in terms of language/culture/ethnicity/religion/nationality/etc not race per se" – is one "seeing race"? But even if one is not "seeing race", one is still seeing prejudice.

Nevertheless, ultimately, one can't go through life blaming everything on racism. However, fighting for centuries to be free, to gain rights, only to be systemically rebuffed, ignored and even oppressed and brutalized along the way in different forms, that has to be recognized for what it is. Using a single event to disprove racism and even arguing that some historical things never happened at the very least is willful ignorance. Then, by the same token, reversing certain laws that were meant to safeguard and protect those rights that they finally did end up receiving. Ignoring what that time and history would do to any community to reinforce ones own stereotypical views, as political leaders use it as a way to stir up support from other disenfranchised communities.

In the end, the problems only get worse as the next generation kicks the can down the road. The issue could have been, perhaps, resolved a long time ago. At this point, things look even more complicated and the longer it goes on the more difficult it is to overcome or resolve.

Really? I'm of predominantly Irish-British descent – are Spaniards, Italians, Greeks a "different race" from me? How about Turks, Syrians, Lebanese, Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Iraqis, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Persians, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Indians? You can travel from one end of Eurasia to the other, and people in Western Europe look rather different from people in South or East or Southeast Asia (who in turn look rather different from each other), and yet they are just different extreme points of a smooth continuum – where on that continuum do you draw the line and say that people on this side are one race and people on the other are another? I can't do it, and I don't believe you can actually do it either.

[0]https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/note/US/RHI625219

Not defending OP here, just providing some possible context for their unfortunate choice of words.

The reasoning there is due to the fact that, in the US at least, race is often tied to identity, in terms of background, culture, and even experience in daily life.

Ultimately, as I eluded to, we should all try to be better people first and foremost. I'm not saying that calling out and standing up to injustice is not important. But we each have the potential to control our own actions much more so than to control anyone else's.

Then what is your definition of color-blindness? What you demand of yourself in that second sentence is pretty much the definition of color-blindness that I was taught, so to me your first and second sentence are in direct opposition: you disavow it in your first sentence, then claim to strive for it in your second.

And yet many Americans seem to treat it, not as a cultural construct specific to their own country, but rather as some sort of objective universal fact. The idea of "race" in itself is not specific to the US, of course – but the US seems to be one of the few countries in which it has been elevated into a government-mandated formal categorisation scheme, as opposed to a vague and ambiguous informal concept.

> All of Eurasia is White, including the Middle East and India

Not India. People from "the Indian subcontinent" are classified as "Asian" not "White", with India and Pakistan explicitly called out as "Asian". I believe, that as far as the US government is concerned, the boundary between "White" and "Asian" runs along the Iran-Pakistan and Afghanistan-Pakistan border. So, a Pashtun is "White" if they come from Afghanistan, but "Asian" if they come from Pakistan? It seems utterly ludicrous – and yet, so many Americans seem unable to see just how ludicrous it is.

> I imagine this is policy driven but haven’t speculated much. It’s an oddity that seems to percolate culturally as well.

I don't think it can be explained simply as "policy-driven" or "culture-driven", I think there is a circular feedback loop "culture -> politics -> policy -> culture".

[0] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html

Many Americans take US-specific cultural concepts about topics such as race, and try to apply them globally, without realising that those concepts fall apart when you try to apply them outside of the specific historical/cultural context in which they evolved. And even in their country of origin, their existence is sustained (in part) by ignoring the existence of people who don't fit into them – so long as those people remain a small enough minority, they can be ignored. If they start to get too numerous and loud, political pressure will result in changes to the scheme to try to accomodate them, through the addition of yet further categories – but failing to address the fundamental problem that trying to reduce the immense biological and cultural diversity of humanity to a small number of coarse categories is a fool's errand.

> I am able to tell the difference between a person from Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, and North Africa.

If you look at the transition zone between the two – places like southern Egypt and northern Sudan – you will find many people whose physical appearance is somewhere in-between the two. You seem to be ignoring the existence of those people.

> China and Europe and India.

Europeans and northern Indians are historically related peoples – they both speak Indo-European languages, Hindi and English are distant relatives of each other. They are both cultural/linguistic descendants of the ancient Aryans, and also have some common biological/genetic ancestry. So what makes them "different races"? Some Pakistanis look rather European – seen most strongly in groups such as the Kalash and Nurstanis – are they a "different race" from Europeans? Why?

The majority of Indians are by ancestry a mixture of Aryan and Dravidian, with greater Aryan ancestry in the north and greater Dravidian ancestry in the south. Does that mean Indians are actually two different races? But the reality is the majority of Indians have ancestry from both–few Indians are purely descended from one or the other–so the idea of classifying Indian people into separate Aryan and Dravidian "races" doesn't work. And don't forget North East India – the majority of people from there have more linguistically and genetically in common with the peoples of China and Tibet and Southeast Asia than with people in the rest of India. What race are they?

> I do get the underlying idea, though. I just think it's naive.

I think your ideas on this topic are naïve.

My argument may be misguided or even wrong in any sense of that term, but I do not think it is naive. Whereas your views may be right, but I still think they are naive.

I think, in the US, skin pigmentation has historically acted as a metonym for the social divide between European-Americans and African-Americans. But, it would be a mistake to take the metonym too literally – and people who are neither have always been somewhat out-of-place, and as the US becomes more diverse the number of people who don't belong to either side continues to grow. Some Indians have darker skin than some African-Americans do – would you expect therefore, that when those Indians immigrate to the US, they'll encounter worse treatment than lighter-skinned African-Americans? I don't think anyone believes that is what actually happens. That's not to say that they don't sometimes experience discrimination to a degree which lighter-skinned Indians do not (whether in India or in the US), but it is an overly simplistic model of how US society actually works to suggest that there is such a simple correlation between one's skin tone and one's societal privilege.

Also, "white" people aren't all one skin tone. My wife and I are both of predominantly northern/western European descent, yet my skin tone is somewhat more "olive", hers is quite pale. In many Irish families with slightly darker skin, the darker skin tone is explained through the legend of Spanish ancestry (ship-wrecked sailors from the Spanish Armada) – I've heard that legend with respect to both my parents' families. Am I, as a slightly-more-olive person of European descent, discriminated against compared to paler-skinned people of European descent? Not as far as I am aware. But, that once again shows that there is no simple and historically universal correlation between skin tone and privilege.

> My argument may be misguided or even wrong in any sense of that term, but I do not think it is naive.

You are American? You seem to keep on making the assumption that ideas derived from American culture are universally applicable, even when more than one non-American tells you that they are not. How is that not naïve?

When people in other countries get more defensive or sensitive to an influx of foreigners is not an indication that racism doesn't exist or race doesn't play a part at all in how they view others. It is a different side of the same coin. Yet, look at how the plight of a white population in Ukraine is seen vs. that in Syria or Yemen or even Rwanda before that.

People can treat foreigners in a prejudiced way without believing that they belong to a "different race". That's still "racism" provided you define "racism" in broad terms to include prejudice and discrimination based on ethnicity/nationality/language/culture/etc – but once you've done that, the concept of "race" is no longer essential to the concept of "racism".

> Yet, look at how the plight of a white population in Ukraine is seen vs. that in Syria or Yemen or even Rwanda before that.

The US government officially considers Syrians to be "white". Syria's President has pale skin and blue eyes, and many other Syrians look like he does–other Syrians have darker eyes and skin, but then so do many Europeans (southern Europeans especially). If you had seen Bashar al-Assad walking the streets of London – he lived there from 1988 to 1994 – and you didn't know who he was, could you have known he wasn't European just by looking at him? I couldn't have. So your idea that Ukrainians are "white" but Syrians are "not white" seems to me rather questionable.

I think most uncompassionate responses to the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis, were not primarily motivated by the physical appearance of Syrians, but rather by their predominant religion. The same point applies to the Bosnian genocide, whose victims were Muslims of Slavic ancestry and language, physically largely indistinguishable from their Christian Serb murderers.

Regarding being able to tell apart races by looking at them, I highly doubt you could I mean are a black US American and a Nigerian the same race? How about a Namibian? In the US the Nigerian would be classified as African American which says a lot about the ridiculousness.

The Civil War was not supposed to have guaranteed anyone any rights.

Some changes to the Constitution rammed through after the Civil War were, but it's important to separate those from the war, which was about the objective that, even before the rebellion, the notionally-abolitionist Republicans expressly put ahead of treating blacks as humans, the preservation of the unity of the Republic.

I don't think mental illness really changes whether or not you have a good heart. I've met many people dealing with mental illness who are gracious and compassionate to all people no matter their race. Though it's possible his views might have been informed by his upbringing or his environment. Perhaps mental illness impairs self-reform or the capability for better judgement, but it can't be said that the mental illness, in and of itself, was the fault of mental illness.

Late edit: racism can't be said to be the fault of mental illness

> not just 4chan massively fucking with him