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BCC was present in RFC680, from 1975. The Unix V6 mail program didn't explicitly have mail folders, but from what I can tell of the man page for the Unix V6 mail command ( http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/1/mail ), the notion that mail could stored somewhere other than the .mail file in the home directory did exist in 1975. The Unix V7 mail command (you can find its man page at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/v7vol1.pdf on page 112) most certainly does support saving mail to multiple mailbox files (and what is an mbox file but a bloody folder, which is essentially what Thunderbird still uses with an additional index file). It's that basic multiple mbox structure that programs like Elm and Pine would ultimately build on top of. MH that appears to be from around 1979 also handles multiple mail folders.

So no, the guy didn't invent bcc or multiple mail folders either. He didn't invent the first GUI mail system, which was probably Xerox's Laurel.

The guy is a liar.

This reminds me of a paper Rob Pike wrote a while back addressing this problem. His solution was a generalization of regular expressions, which he termed Structural Regular Expressions. I'm not sure how these stack up against context-free grammars, but it's an interesting approach that seems at least fairly similar to the Dartmouth work. In any case, I didn't see it as a reference, so I thought I'd mention it.

People have been trying to adapt line-oriented regular expressions to handle other sorts of data since at least the 1980s. Structured regular expressions were introduced with the Plan 9 system, but never seem to have caught on elsewhere.

It certainly would be nice to have tools that readily handle multi-line data, rather than forcing everything to fit into a line oriented format. It would be wonderful to be able to fix up indentation in version controlled files without making the history unreadable, for example.

Here's some more FUD, BS and lies from other people who, like Linus Torvalds, don't know what they are talking about and have zero credibility.

Some of us wonder why no one can get their head out of their ass and statically link. That applies to all major OSes.

People who really care about freedom and know what they're doing run real UNIX operating systems and wouldn't touch Linux, Gnome, GTK, Qt, PulseAudio, Avahi, etc with a 10 foot pole. As for everyone else: 99% of them run Windows or Mac.

(Signed: Alex Libman's sockpuppet.)

Java programming and bureaucratic standards, with some luck they will catch soon up with the level of C++ insanity.

Java programming and bureaucratic standards, with some luck they will catch soon up with the level of C++ insanity.

The government should not be in the business of granting and enforcing private monopolies. The only economy that benefits is that of lawyers and other parasites.

...about [web] standards is that there are so many crappy ones to choose from.

That said, I thank all deities ever dreamed up that CSS is not an an XML dialect, the semantics are a mess, but at least its got a minimally sane syntax, which is quite a rarity this days (JSON is another rare exception).

...about [web] standards is that there are so many crappy ones to choose from.

That said, I thank all deities ever dreamed up that CSS is not an an XML dialect, the semantics are a mess, but at least its got a minimally sane syntax, which is quite a rarity this days (JSON is another rare exception).

There are many more hundreds of billions in indirect costs, how much is worth all the harassment of innocent citizens by the TSA? Much more than you might think when millions of people start to avoid flying because it is not worth the hassle. Or the cost to tourism from all the people that just don't want to be humiliated to visit the US.

And that barely scratches the surface of all the hidden costs of the so called "War on Terror" and the resulting security circus.

There are many more hundreds of billions in indirect costs, how much is worth all the harassment of innocent citizens by the TSA? Much more than you might think when millions of people start to avoid flying because it is not worth the hassle. Or the cost to tourism from all the people that just don't want to be humiliated to visit the US.

And that barely scratches the surface of all the hidden costs of the so called "War on Terror" and the resulting security circus.

Before displaying your silly prejudices it would be useful if you informed yourself a bit.

Go has pointers but no pointer arithmetic, which allows it to be safe unlike C. Also, Java and pretty much every other 'modern' language has pointers, all objects are passed by reference, but the programmer has no real control over the memory layout of structures and pointers are 'hidden' from the programmer (most of the time) and you are left at the mercy of the design decisions the creators of the language made; this is one of the many reasons why Java sucks so much.

What Go provides you is explicit control over memory layout and whatever you pass things by reference or by value, this is extremely useful for systems programming, and gives the programmer much more clear control over what his code is doing.

> its time to start ignoring the laws.

As Ian Clarke said in an /. comment many years ago:

"It is the responsibility of every citizen to ignore dumb laws."

And as dumb as most laws are, this kind of tax reaches a new level of idiocy.

Interestingly at Canonical they are starting to use Go for their backend infrastructure.

I wonder if they will start to replace components of the grid stack with stuff written in Go like Doozer.

All patent systems are hopelessly fucked, software patents just make this patently (haha) obvious.

And in Europe we are not out of the woods on that topic either, they are still trying to enact software patents, and companies with failed business models rarely give up on trying to enlist the help of the government to crush their more productive competition using the legal system.

Enterprisey software is specially bad, but the Unix principles of KISS and "do one thing and do it well" have long been forgotten by the software industry (or corrupted into "lets treat the lusers as if they are completely retarded, and lets hide all complexity under the carpet, where it can ferment until it explodes in a mass of bloated detritus and bugs").

So OO Programming because it's unsuitable for a modern CS curriculum. I guess we should go back to just assembly language so we can make sure we never go down this road of false progress again.

No, trust me, they probably already have some other higher level paradigm lined up, perhaps functional. While I may disagree with OO being anti-parallel (have they never heard of thread classes?) and anti-modular (WTF? what are classes if not modules?), I can see how they might want to start students out on something simpler or more straightforward. For a little better understanding into this mindset, see Object Oriented Programming is Inherently Harmful.

is "would this happen without patents".

I can agree on that. And science studies have shown that progress would "happen" without patents; Promoting Intellectual Discovery: Patents Versus Markets.

Drugs simply won't happen without patents

But, besides the above science link, I totally disagree with this. There are alternatives to pharmaceutical patents. Governments fund drug reseach too. The US's National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars developing and testing Taxol, a drug used to treat breast and other cancers. The NCI then sold all the exclusive rights to the use of the research for FDA approval to Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS). How much did BMS pay? A fraction of NCI's costs. Add how much money did BMS make? In 2000, BMS bought the rights in 1988-9, BMS made almost $1 Billion. Besides that, answering the question Do drug companies do more marketing or research? is answered as thus: Drug industry spends nearly twice as much on marketing than on research and development. Beyond that, Economists say copyright and patent laws are killing innovation; hurting economy. Thomas Jefferson once said "inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

Falcon

Source: Bjarne Stroustrup explains the real reason why he created C++.

D is an almost worse convoluted mess of insane 'features' than C++.

Add the D1/D2 split plus multiple 'standard' (haha) libs, and the result is not particularly fun to deal with.

But the D fanboys (which I doubt use D for anything) love to ignore all the problems and over-sell their pet language to the point that they talk about features that are not even implemented yet.

But hey, if C++ has damaged your brain enough, this might be just the thing for you.

First, just let me preface this by saying C++ is my bread and butter; I write about 90% of my code in it these days, mostly because I'm a maintenance programmer (but don't let that fool you; much of the stuff I "maintain" I have to re-write from scratch (or almost scratch) because the code is nowhere near clear).

To me, C++ has a lot going for it: it's pretty much as fast as C, and much more clear with powerful language constructs. I'm not much of an expert on other languages (I'm mostly a depth-first learner), but I've yet to see another language have something as powerful as templates/generics (besides Ada, which is where C++ got them from). The fact that you can do compile-time programming speaks volumes for the power of templates.

Now I'll grant you that it's not always clear what C++ does behind the scenes - but this is true of the other languages you listed, and is mostly a performance problem anyway. If a programmer understands an abstraction (and a programmer *should* understand the abstractions he or she uses), then it's not a problem. Two books I can highly recommend that not only clear up what C++ does behind the scenes, but teach a lot of good coding technique besides are "Thinking in C++" volumes one and two. Sure, they may be 1600 pages combined, but you learn a lot.

A bigger problem I see with C++ is that it is, to put it politely, a "federation of languages", and most people don't even realize it. I've heard that many shops end up picking just the pieces of the language their programmers are familiar with and forbidding the use of anything else, which is fine until someone stumbles on to something they don't understand.

Me, I learn what I use, and what I use is C++ because that's what the software I'm maintaining is written in. Perhaps one day I'll delve as deeply into another language as I have with C++, but I've already picked up a number of programming concepts I wasn't proficient with before (coming from C and Perl), so I have to at least defend C++ for being a powerful and fast language.

An interesting link you might like: C++ is Good for the Economy, It Creates Jobs!.

As Rob Pike noted two decades ago: "Not only Unix is dead, but it is starting to smell really bad." So does it really matter much who claims to 'own' Unix today? Specially when 'Unix' means little more than a trademark and perhaps ownership of some really ancient code nobody uses anymore.

As Rob Pike noted two decades ago: "Not only Unix is dead, but it is starting to smell really bad." So does it really matter much who claims to 'own' Unix today? Specially when 'Unix' means little more than a trademark and perhaps ownership of some really ancient code nobody uses anymore.

And as hideous as Java code can be (and often is), XML suck smuch more. XML is verbose, unreadable, and a huge pain in the ass to edit.

And as hideous as Java code can be (and often is), XML suck smuch more. XML is verbose, unreadable, and a huge pain in the ass to edit.

Exactly, and this is one of the many advantages that Go has over Java (and even over C++, which also can be extremely slow due to the huge overload of dynamic linking, hence hideous hacks like 'prelinking'.

Startup time and memory overhead *does* matter, and all 'benchmarks' out there that claim that Java performance is competitive completely ignore both.

Exactly, and this is one of the many advantages that Go has over Java (and even over C++, which also can be extremely slow due to the huge overload of dynamic linking, hence hideous hacks like 'prelinking'.

Startup time and memory overhead *does* matter, and all 'benchmarks' out there that claim that Java performance is competitive completely ignore both.

I think they ran out of 'reasonable features' a while ago. Java has been a huge pile of crud for some time now, and with stuff like the badly botched addition of generics (even Joshua Bloch admits nobody really understands the mess created by generics in Java), this are only going to get worse.

apple, Microsoft and Sun all have radically changed their widowing systems on many occasions while maintaining continuity for their developers. It did not mean no work, it just meant that recompiles could produce a functional product in most cases, albeit one that might look like poo and not have any of the new capabilities of the windowing system.

I find it somewhat hard to believe that the original design of X was so perfectly extendible that after decades of use it is not straining its seems.

So a change may be good.

However, i do see a downside. The nice thing about X unlike Windows and Macs main display interface is that it is more easily separated from the desktop. If you want to use a mac or windows system remotely you have to use something like VNC or a remote desktop app. In both cases you are getting the whole desktop not a display window. You can't run multiple instances of it. That's the main thing I like about X.

I would like a 9P2000 file system interface similar to plan9 /dev/draw, which could be used for totally network transparent sharing standard of Wayland and X11 or whatever windows over the network. http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/IWP9/2008/v9fb.pdf

HTTP is a huge complex mountain of hacks on top of other hacks. We are just lucky that no more 'features' have been added to it for some time.

I have been thinking about defining a sane subset and calling it HTTP 0.2, but every time I look into it the sheer messiness of the HTTP standard and existing implementations is just too depressing to handle.

That was more than ten years ago, and OpenBSD is still the *nix OS that remains closest to the original Unix style and spirit.

Being a BSD variant it means it already started to deviate from the Unix way long ago, but with the notable exception of Plan 9 (not surprising given that the original Unix team were responsible for Plan 9, and by the way now are working on Go), all other *nix-like systems are much, much worse.

The quality of OpenBSD code is also much better than that of any other popular OS, and its developers are usually fairly good at restraining themselves from implementing popular 'features' that simply add complexity and no real value.

In short, if you like simplicity and quality, give OpenBSD a try, I'm still very grateful it was my first exposure to *nix systems.

That was more than ten years ago, and OpenBSD is still the *nix OS that remains closest to the original Unix style and spirit.

Being a BSD variant it means it already started to deviate from the Unix way long ago, but with the notable exception of Plan 9 (not surprising given that the original Unix team were responsible for Plan 9, and by the way now are working on Go), all other *nix-like systems are much, much worse.

The quality of OpenBSD code is also much better than that of any other popular OS, and its developers are usually fairly good at restraining themselves from implementing popular 'features' that simply add complexity and no real value.

In short, if you like simplicity and quality, give OpenBSD a try, I'm still very grateful it was my first exposure to *nix systems.

Nah, they will just end up with a cross-licensing agreement so they all get to share all their forks and anyone that is not already a member of the club starves to death (ie., create an oligopoly and make sure no new competition joins in).

Got to love how "intellectual property" encourages competition and innovation by shutting down anyone new from entering an existing industry!

It has nothing to do with sense, it is not supposed to make any sense, it is security theater, all it is designed to do is make people feel that the government is doing something and at the same time help fill the pockets of the "security" industry scam artists.

Funny given Rob Pike's involvement with the creation of UTF-8.

Sad that as has has become common, everyone and their dog want their pet feature in Go, totally missing the point of the language which is: a small and very carefully selected set of features that work well together and don't interfere with each other in unexpected ways.

Sad also that ken's involvement in the creation of both UTF-8 and Go goes unmentioned.

In any case, is there people out there have forgotten what a huge pain it was to program in APL?

There are reason why modern successors of APL, like K (which by the way is a super cool language) stick to ASCII: you can actually write code without going insane!

Funny given Rob Pike's involvement with the creation of UTF-8.

Sad that as has has become common, everyone and their dog want their pet feature in Go, totally missing the point of the language which is: a small and very carefully selected set of features that work well together and don't interfere with each other in unexpected ways.

Sad also that ken's involvement in the creation of both UTF-8 and Go goes unmentioned.

In any case, is there people out there have forgotten what a huge pain it was to program in APL?

There are reason why modern successors of APL, like K (which by the way is a super cool language) stick to ASCII: you can actually write code without going insane!

That somebody stood up to the ridiculous security circus.

I used to love to fly, now I avoid it as much as possible, the idiotic senseless humiliating farce that one has to endure to get on board is just too much.

This is interesting, but not as interesting as the interview where Bjarne Stroustrup explains the real reason for inventing C++.

(Yes, it is satire, but very sharp and insightful satire.)

It will make the software industry so horribly unequal, one will again be able to tell the difference between mediocre software and truly horribly evil software again. As some NASA developers once put it:

"JAVA truly is the great equalizing software. It has reduced all computers to mediocrity and buggyness."

But in all truth, we wont get rid of Java any time soon, it has become the new COBOL that will haunt us fifty years from now.

"... an octopus made by nailing extra legs onto a dog." -- Steve Taylor

The funny part is, he's ultimately blaming the language for coder's problems.

No he isn't, he's saying that good programmers avoid C++. He's far from the only knowledgable person to hold this opinion and the most telling quotes on that page are from Stroustrup himself.

C++ FQA (frequently questioned answers)
(Defective C++ is a summary)

'There are only two things wrong with C++: The initial concept and the implementation' - and other quotes

Why C++ sucks

And, previsibly: http://cplusplussucks.com/

Operating systems are pretty much irrelevent anyway, browser or no.

Unless you think the height of the art is one of the bloated copies of a decades old OS design.

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/

I'm rather interested in using Objective-C on Linux

I develop the majority of my iPhone apps on linux, mostly I'm writing C. The ObjC stuff is kept to a minimum until I switch to OSX and import into XCode. The best ObjC tutorial I found was reading the GNUStep header files. The only other documentation I bothered with was the trivial stuff for GNUStep make.

Last time I looked at Vala it looked quite interesting, until I started trying to figure out how to do the things I knew I needed to do...and the answer appeared to be "Use standard C libraries, but we don't bother to document that, because you're supposed to already know that."

If you want to know how something works in Vala, it's mostly documented. 3rd party libraries are documented _somewhere_, the bindings are self-documenting. Grep the .vapi and you have all the information you need to use the binding. Remember that Vala is not yet stable, some of the bindings are incomplete and the Posix profile is (currently) useless by itself.

If you're beginning to see the "self-documenting" pattern here, it's not limited to open source projects. I personally find Apples API documents useless, again I favor using their header files for reference.

But C and C++ seem to be undocumented. You're supposed to "just know" it.

C is a very simple language and a copy of "K&R" goes a long way. Very few people know C++.

I understand that gobj is important, but I can't find where it's documented,

I'm currently getting HTTP timeouts from library.gnome.org. There's a link to the documentation at the bottom of the GObject wikipedia article. Vala transparently wraps GObject via the C API so you can also pass --save-temps and study the generated C code.

> A initially rather secure document format (PDF) has become insecure because Adobe has added a plethora of mostly useless functions like Flash, Javascript etc to it.

Sadly this days that seems to be the trajectory followed by most software projects.

More and more bloat, more and more useless crap that nobody really needs or wants but that adds more and more complexity and makes systems more and more fragile.

> No studio is attached to the project, but at least Natali promised 'No Keanu'.

Thank God!

And really, of all directors left after Kubrick died, I think Natali is one of the very few qualified to do the job. Cube was one of the best films of the 90's, and one of the best science fiction films of the last twenty years.

And I really hope that he follows William Gibson's advice.

> No studio is attached to the project, but at least Natali promised 'No Keanu'.

Thank God!

And really, of all directors left after Kubrick died, I think Natali is one of the very few qualified to do the job. Cube was one of the best films of the 90's, and one of the best science fiction films of the last twenty years.

And I really hope that he follows William Gibson's advice.

George Carlin must be rolling in his grave at close to the speed of light. Will the pussyfication of America never end? political correctness is going to destroy the world!