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Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Ad hominem fallacies aside (*) that doesn't change the fact that some programming languages are total shit.

What is THE purpose of a programming language? To communicate with a machine. You can communicate in an obtuse way, verbose way, in a precise way, in an ambiguous way, etc. There is a range of QUALITY. There is poor communication and there is good communication.

The reality is that ALL programming languages suck -- some just more then others. One of the properties of a good programming language is that it is consistent. i.e. See PHP is a fractal of bad design

> Sometimes I think you just hate any language that's actually useful ...

IF I was idealist I wouldn't use any programming language -- but that is not realistic. I'm a pragmatist -- things need to get implemented in the Real World TM. However, that doesn't mean I'm going to just blindly accept and ignore the problems of a language.

> ... extremely useful JavaScript ..

Let's talk about Javaschit.

Is it useful? Yes! It has become the new BASIC of the millennium. It is ubiquitous.

I'm NOT against useful languages -- I'm against the BAD DESIGN and IMPLEMENTATION of them.

Do you know how many man years are wasted tracking down bugs simply due to misspelling??? All because the language designer was too fucking lazy to make the KLUDGE "use strict"; the DEFAULT. It's as if NOTHING was learnt from the experience of BASIC. Gee, if only the computer could tell us about misspelled variable names, oh wait, they can! Good engineering is about FAIL EARLY. Javascript was never designed with that mindset -- it was literally hacked together in 10 days. And 20+ years later we are STILL paying the price.

On the other end of the spectrum we have over-engineered shit like Boost where a simple to Read and Write ~25 lines implementation of CRC32 turns into 1,100+ lines of Crap++. WHEN was the last time you _actually_ needed to modify a CRC implementation??? If you need a stronger hash than CRC32 then, chances are, you are probably using a DIFFERENT hash such as FNV, SHA1, etc. due to a) performance, or b) more cryptographically secure (i.e. less collisions.) reasons. The Boost guys have become so obsessed over one little tree that they COMPLETELY missed the entire fucking forest.

Let's talk about C. It was a stupid decision to default every function as returning int. Why wasn't the return type mandatory? Having to run a "lint" program is a SYMPTOM. So why wasn't the CAUSES addressed?

Let's talk about C++. We are STILL waiting for modules -- something that has been standard in Pascal for 35+ years! Why aren't error messages _standardized_ ?? One of the few things MS Visual C++ does right -- is to provide an unique error code. This makes it easier to search for solutions. Go figure!

I am extremely vocal about shitty engineering practices because I'm tired of having to deal with other people's retarded designs and waste MY timing tracking down WTF is wrong with their broken, inconsistent, implementations.

If nothing is ever said about WHY said designs are crap then nothing will ever change.

I am only one voice out of many saying WHY PHP sucks (When even diehard PHP users say PHP needs to die you know there is a problem.)

People who use PHP are either ignorant, stupid, lazy or some combination of them. But that should come as no surprise -- it was designed for non-programmers. Gee and is there ANY wonder it has problems when any decent prog

Well, there is some work going on towards a distributed social networking protocol.

Personally what I'd want would be something that involves all personal data being encrypted on the server side according to a private key that only the user has, with shared sub-information being encryped with shared sub-keys. Thus, even if the distributed social networking server is compromised, private data will remain (largely) private. Some more thought needs to be put into ensuring that it's not easy to infer the presence of shared keys, or otherwise even the encrypted data would allow an attacker to infer part of the structure of the acquaintance graph (which can then be used to infer other information).

Excuse me?

They are the definition of a Church. I see next to no difference between them and the Roman Catholic Church. An organization who suckers people in with platitudes, encouraging them to open their pocketbooks on an ongoing basis, to benefit those at the top?

For fuck's sake, the pope wears a gold god damned hat and sits on a gold fucking throne. I'm pretty sure that church sums up Scientology quite neatly. Just like every other church.

I blogged about the possibilities of using BitTorrent to deliver web content back in April, but I didn't consider RSS. The idea worked out between myself and some friends was a network of transparent proxies as a way of dealing with Slashdot-style "flash crowds". When you request content, your proxy requests the content from you, and simultaneously broadcasts the request to nearby machines. If any of those machines have already downloaded the content (some form of timestamp and hash is necessary to ensure it's the correct and authentic version of that URL) then they will send that content to you, allowing servers already under or expecting heavy load to push out a new HTTP status message "use torrent", supplying a (much smaller) torrent file. This allows web servers to scale much better under flash crowd conditions.

The drawback of the WebTorrent idea is that you need some way to group all the images, text and stylesheets together, otherwise you have to make a n inefficient P2P request for each one. RSS is a great way of doing that.

There aren't many details online at the moment of the work we did on the WebTorrent idea; it was mainly an e-mail thread -- get in touch if you'd like details. The project page is available, but I stopped updating it so it doesn't have all the work that was eventually done.

I blogged about the possibilities of using BitTorrent to deliver web content back in April, but I didn't consider RSS. The idea worked out between myself and some friends was a network of transparent proxies as a way of dealing with Slashdot-style "flash crowds". When you request content, your proxy requests the content from you, and simultaneously broadcasts the request to nearby machines. If any of those machines have already downloaded the content (some form of timestamp and hash is necessary to ensure it's the correct and authentic version of that URL) then they will send that content to you, allowing servers already under or expecting heavy load to push out a new HTTP status message "use torrent", supplying a (much smaller) torrent file. This allows web servers to scale much better under flash crowd conditions.

The drawback of the WebTorrent idea is that you need some way to group all the images, text and stylesheets together, otherwise you have to make a n inefficient P2P request for each one. RSS is a great way of doing that.

There aren't many details online at the moment of the work we did on the WebTorrent idea; it was mainly an e-mail thread -- get in touch if you'd like details. The project page is available, but I stopped updating it so it doesn't have all the work that was eventually done.