We need smarter compilers that can understand smarter languages, not more complex languages to feed to still-quite-dumb parsers.
No, we don't. People make these claims every once in a while but they are never well thought out.
Just because you don't understand the deficiencies doesn't mean that they don't exist
A compiler will never understand natural language for the simple fact that not even humans can understand natural language anywhere close to 100% of the time.
But that is not what was argued - we aren't arguing for a natural language programming language; we're asking for one that's simpler to read, even if harder to implement. What we have are harder-to-read-but-easier-to-implement languages (and yes, I've implemented a few in my time).
Natural is not designed for that . Programming languages are and that is why they are different.
Incorrect. Programming languages are they way they are due to ease of implementation, not ease of programmability.
There is no need for the semi-colon - we know exactly where the expression ends.
Do you? always? In a powerful language it will never leave ambiguities?
Yes. See lisp.
Many languages do get rid of semi-colons for probably the reason you state.
And some languages never had them.
JavaScript will "inject" them if it find a place you probably wanted one. Some people like that and some don't but almost all the big players use them. Perhaps get rid of periods in English because you should be able to figure out where the clause ends.
There is no need for commas between arguments
Even English uses commas to separate a list.
What makes you think arguments/parameters are a list?
The commas are there to be more like natural language and be easier to read for both computer and human. Or should we ditch the comma in English too because we can probably figure it out from context?
You are making strawmen arguments: No one proposes to replace commas because we can "probably" figure it out, we propose to replace them where they can always be figured out. In much the same way, I never proposed that natural language is a replacement for computer programming languages, only that current computer programming languages are descended from languages that are easy for a computer but hard for a human, hence there are many things that are superfluous.
I suppose you might think differently after you get some experience under your belt. I thought pretty much the same way when I was a newbie at programming too.
It is called void because it returns nothing. It is so the compiler knows where the return type ends and where the method/function name begins.
Are you listening to yourself? This is specifically what his rant is about - designing the language for the compiler to understand, and only secondarily for the human to understand. You've kinda re-emphasised his point - too much in the language is due to the inability of the compiler to understand what we are trying to express. We need smarter compilers that can understand smarter languages, not more complex languages to feed to still-quite-dumb parsers.
As an example, consider a composite method invocation foo.bar (a1, a2, bar.baz (b1, b2), a4);
There is no need for the semi-colon - we know exactly where the expression ends.
There is no need for commas between arguments - it's obvious from the brackets where the second invocation starts and ends and thus obvious where all the arguments go and in what order
And that's just off of the top of my head - gimme some time and I'll point out a whole slew of other stupidities forced upon the human programmer by the computer language that makes reading code a real pain in the rear. Sure, static is needed - but why is it needed for hello world? Same goes for void - if the method/function returns nothing, just leave it blank (oh, but we can't do that because then the compiler becomes difficult to write!!!).
I've got the code that NSA uses to break SHA-5 and all the current tough encryption used worldwide. The code is written in lisp, and as proof that I have the encryption breaker and un-hasher, I post the last 5 lines of it below:
))
))
))
))
))
Damn filter error! Doesn't let me post this comment, so ignore this sentence; treat it like an IBM manual with "this page intentionally left blank" written on it
But that's a terrible analogy - aside for having no cars at all in it, most people win this lottery. When you have say, 20% saying "the system is rigged, it's all a scam", 60% working and content, and 20% saying "this sucks, but it's my own fault", it's hard to justify the first group.
It's equally hard to justify saying "it's their own damn fault" when such a large number of people are falling into the first and third categories.
Look, when I was young the single biggest thing keeping me down was the idea that a regular full-time job was some sort of scam, and it was only once I got over that that my life went anywhere.
Well, I thought that way twenty years ago, and I still think that way, and I'm still mostly a success. It's just that now I see more clearly how the powerful and influential wield their power - when I was young I never had such depth of thought. So, I decided that I'd simply try to become one of "them", and that's working out quite well:)
I see a lot of people who expected to just walk into a middle-class lifestyle straight out of college, and who are upset there's no "good" job waiting for them.
I haven't seen that in the last ten years; my perception matches just about everyone else who replied to you. To whit, there are no jobs, except for a few lucky enough to be connected (where I am unemployment is around the 25% mark, with you unemployment closer to 60%. A full 80% of graduating high-schoolers don't get jobs immediately after finishing school, thus they cannot finance themselves into a college.
It doesn't work that way - but that doesn't mean the "good" job doesn't exist, just that college didn't get you there, there are more steps to take first.
Look, I come from a poor background (think typical African township, with poultry flapping around when cars backfire and children running barefoot in dirt roads). When I left high-school I was lucky enough to get a job in a textile factory (working 7 nights a week, from 19h00 to 07h00) for around $20 USD a week. The only way to survive was to continue living with my parents. I used the income from that job to embark on a correspondence study course, and after the first year of computer science and maths was lucky enough to be hired at the local university. From there on in I just jumped from job to job every five years or so, upgrading each time.
However, I acknowledge that I was lucky to get that first job. Many of my mates from high-school only got jobs years later (some never - they did the best they could growing vegetables and whatnot). Had I not gotten lucky with that first factory job then I wouldn't have been here today typing this and trying to convince you that, no, it's not just your mindset, it's mostly luck when you're young. When there are 200 qualified applicants for 2 positions, then it merely comes down to who gets lucky.
Perhaps you're not actually reading (in which case I'm not sure this will help) but what I'm yelling is: "I did it, so can you".
I think that perhaps you are missing the point; let me try to explain via analogy.
In this particular story, set in a poor world, there is a lottery, that pays out enough to keep the winner in money for life. Everyone enters the lottery, every week. There is only one winner, and one week it is our friend (you) and he is yelling as hard as he can "Hey everybody! I did it, so can you!!!" and he does not understand why everyone thinks that he is retarded for making that argument. He just cannot understand why everyone is moaning about not having money, when it is so simple to him: just win the lottery, like he did. He also cannot understand why the other people just don't understand what he is saying. Why do they keep complaining about not having money when all they have to do is win the lottery?
I hope you get the point now; if you don't, then there is no hope for you.
While two wrongs do not make a right, the law is not about right or wrong. The reason courts place so much emphasis on precedence is to ensure that the law is dispensed fairly - so if someone in the past got X years in jail for committing activity Y with characterstics Y.a, Y.b... Y.z, then it's only fair that the next person who did Y with Y.a... Y.z should get a similar sentence.
Let me emphasise: The law is not about doing no wrong, so we don't care if the second wrong doesn't make it right; we only care if the second wrong makes it fair.
First IT people should start with not needing to change my password every month. That will make me select a safer one, because I can remember it.
We do that because the assumption has to be that given enough time, your password will be compromised. The longer you have to wait to change it, the longer the window of exposure when that happens.
Yes. Because of course an attacker that has only had the password for the last 29 days neglected to install backdoors and keypress-capture software in the 29 days that he had access to the system, so of course you should change the password before the attacker installs the malware on the 31st day of compromise.
Is it any wonder, with that 29-day logic, that normal intelligent people regard IT people as slightly retarded? The 29-day policy forces easily guessable dictionary passwords with incrementing numbers somewhere in them, preventing the normal computer user from ever picking a good password. Face it, any system that's been compromised will, within a few minutes, have all its future passwords compromised as well, until such time that the system is purged of all malware. Whether your "assumption" is compromised-within-a-month or a compromised-within-a-day, expiring passwords have no actual effect on security.
I will concede that it is possible, in a technologically advanced society (as we find ourselves in), to, with much expense and effort, replace the meat portion of our diet and supplement a vegetarian diet with pills with only a negligible drop in the nutrition a body gets, but that option is not available to many, nor is it desirable to many of those that it is available to.
It's kind of like watching the functional programming people slowly reinvent OOP...makes me scream inside. "Dude, we've figured out a new way to organize our methods / fields so that it's easier to keep them straight in our heads..." "Please God, let it not be OOP." "*talks for a bit*" "Damn it."
I find it quite funny when the OO-crowd goes off like this:-)
(In case no one else clues you in: you've got it backward - Functional came first, and gave the world OO. OO now constantly reinvents everything that lisp had, under the guise of "new and improved")
It is, in fact, very restrictive. If one wants truly free software, one uses a more free license or makes one's code public domain.
I have to respond to this: while I release my stuff (well, much of it) under BSD[1], such as the stuff in my sig below, I never considered that GPL was "restrictive" in any way. It's the creators right to decide how people should redistribute their creations, and if a creator decides that other creators who modify the creation must also release their modifications, then so be it... there is nothing at all restrictive about asking that people who change your creations and then distribute the changed creations must also allow others to modify the derived creation.
That being said, I tend to use BSD because:
1. Less confusion; only two paragraphs to read
2. I want people to use my stuff and give me credit. BSD let's me do that. I don't care if they modify my stuff and then distribute for a profit - as long as they take care to provide credit to me as the licence requires I'm all good.
3. GPL turns off potential users (remember that contributors are users first, before becoming contributors!) and I'm usually aiming for as many users as possible.
BSD software stands a reasonably high chance (compared to GPL) of getting integrated into a major piece of commercial software. This provides additional avenues of income to me by raising my profile. The value provided by being credited (for example) by Google as a contributor is much much more than I would hope to get from simply releasing my little libraries and experiments for monetary gain or reciprocal sharing.
The only value I can possibly gain from GPL is from the reciprocal sharing, when people contribute code back to my project. That value is too little compared to the value I will gain in raised profile when the code is integrated into a successfull (or not) commercial product.
[1] Some of the older stuff is under GPL as I don't want to maintain them and am hoping someone takes them over.
If people would just stop harping on Metro, (honestly, you don't even see it 95% of the time if you open only a single application at a time and then proceed to do no work)
(If you'd like to read more email me; I'm about 75% done with a tiny eBook on money and it's development. There will eventually be a bitcoin section in there).
I'd never pay for your eBook with Bitcoin, but I do have a nice sack of potatoes here.
I might not accept bitcoins, but I will certainly accept potatoes:)
I assure you that I do. I'm not blinded by fanaticism as you seem to be. It doesn't matter how many well-reasoned arguments I've thrown your way, you simply ignore them and repeat the bitcoin party-line. Here's a tip - all those things you are spouting that you think are so new and novel that make bitcoin a currency? The world has heard it all before - we've seen this movie before. It's only new to you.
Bitcoin can be divided into two 0.5BTC pieces, or into 10,000 0.0001BTC pieces harmlessly and it doesn't cease to be a currency that way.
Actually, yes it does. Plus, you don't understand it at all, as is evidenced by you switching your argument to divisibility from trading. Bitcoins suffer from the same shortfalls that gold does, as a currency. No amount of whining in the world is going to change that I'm afraid. We've been through this before.
Please include the part about bitcoin being infinitely divisible and cheap to transport in your ebook.
Ok.
"Dividing the currency currently in existence to ensure that more people can have some of it makes the current holders of that currency much richer without them needing to do anything".
It's now included. You can't simply divide the currency when you run out - that makes some people richer for no good reason, leading to hording, which turns even normal currency (which bitcoin isn't right now) into a commodity. The minute you "divide" a currency into smaller units for normal trading purposes it stops being a currency.
I'd like to see your conversation with the salesperson at a checkout point of a supermarket with you trying to pay for other purchased goods (of matching value) with a bag of potatoes.
It would be the same conversation that would occur were I to try paying with bitcoins.
Which brings us in a rather circular way back to the original point: there is no practical difference between someone accepting payment in bitcoins and someone accepting payment in a bag of potatoes. "Accepting payment in $FOO" doesn't make $FOO a currency, or money or tender of any sort. Criteria for what constitutes a currency is high enough that it disqualifies precious metals, after all. Bitcoin doesn't (yet?) satisfy the criteria for being a currency.
Now, it's possible that in the future bitcoins will satisfy the criteria for being a currency and everyone will trade in it... then you run into the same problem that we ran into with precious metals and cowrie shells: there is no match between the "currency" and the value it is supposed to represent (which is why precious metals were eventually abandoned as currencies).
Ironically, by following the same model used by precious metals (mining a finite resource at a specified and hard-to-change rate), bitcoins are doomed to be abandoned as currencies too... that's if they ever get adopted as currrencies - but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and say that it will one day achieve critical mass and take off, only to be shot down later when it runs into the same problems that gold and silver and diamonds and bronze and tools and cowrie shells and cows and goats and poultry ran into.
(If you'd like to read more email me; I'm about 75% done with a tiny eBook on money and it's development. There will eventually be a bitcoin section in there).
You should ask the people of the B-Ark how well their unlimited currency worked out for them. As I recall, before the drastic measures kicked in, it took roughly 3 forests in order to buy one ships peanut.
And with built-in scarcity at a creation rate that tends towards zero, you'll have the opposite extreme: it'll take a fraction of a single molecule of the leaf of a tree to purchase an entire planet. What's needed is some sort of in-between; an ability to match the rate to the value societal output. This is, of course, why currencies cannot be backed by gold or silver - there is no way to adjust the value easily if societal output changes. It's also why bitcoin isn't a good currency.
you can exchange it for other currencies or goods & services, how exactly is it a fake currency?
Down at the local market I can exchange potatoes for other currencies or goods & services; that doesn't make potatoes a real currency though. Bitcoins are commodities. Nothing more, nothing less.
Slashdot Mirror
We need smarter compilers that can understand smarter languages, not more complex languages to feed to still-quite-dumb parsers.
No, we don't. People make these claims every once in a while but they are never well thought out.
Just because you don't understand the deficiencies doesn't mean that they don't exist
A compiler will never understand natural language for the simple fact that not even humans can understand natural language anywhere close to 100% of the time.
But that is not what was argued - we aren't arguing for a natural language programming language; we're asking for one that's simpler to read, even if harder to implement. What we have are harder-to-read-but-easier-to-implement languages (and yes, I've implemented a few in my time).
Natural is not designed for that . Programming languages are and that is why they are different.
Incorrect. Programming languages are they way they are due to ease of implementation, not ease of programmability.
There is no need for the semi-colon - we know exactly where the expression ends.
Do you? always? In a powerful language it will never leave ambiguities?
Yes. See lisp.
Many languages do get rid of semi-colons for probably the reason you state.
And some languages never had them.
JavaScript will "inject" them if it find a place you probably wanted one. Some people like that and some don't but almost all the big players use them. Perhaps get rid of periods in English because you should be able to figure out where the clause ends.
There is no need for commas between arguments
Even English uses commas to separate a list.
What makes you think arguments/parameters are a list?
The commas are there to be more like natural language and be easier to read for both computer and human. Or should we ditch the comma in English too because we can probably figure it out from context?
You are making strawmen arguments: No one proposes to replace commas because we can "probably" figure it out, we propose to replace them where they can always be figured out. In much the same way, I never proposed that natural language is a replacement for computer programming languages, only that current computer programming languages are descended from languages that are easy for a computer but hard for a human, hence there are many things that are superfluous.
I suppose you might think differently after you get some experience under your belt. I thought pretty much the same way when I was a newbie at programming too.
It is called void because it returns nothing. It is so the compiler knows where the return type ends and where the method/function name begins.
Are you listening to yourself? This is specifically what his rant is about - designing the language for the compiler to understand, and only secondarily for the human to understand. You've kinda re-emphasised his point - too much in the language is due to the inability of the compiler to understand what we are trying to express. We need smarter compilers that can understand smarter languages, not more complex languages to feed to still-quite-dumb parsers.
As an example, consider a composite method invocation foo.bar (a1, a2, bar.baz (b1, b2), a4);
There is no need for the semi-colon - we know exactly where the expression ends.
There is no need for commas between arguments - it's obvious from the brackets where the second invocation starts and ends and thus obvious where all the arguments go and in what order
And that's just off of the top of my head - gimme some time and I'll point out a whole slew of other stupidities forced upon the human programmer by the computer language that makes reading code a real pain in the rear. Sure, static is needed - but why is it needed for hello world? Same goes for void - if the method/function returns nothing, just leave it blank (oh, but we can't do that because then the compiler becomes difficult to write!!!).
Sounds like you need lisp
I've got the code that NSA uses to break SHA-5 and all the current tough encryption used worldwide. The code is written in lisp, and as proof that I have the encryption breaker and un-hasher, I post the last 5 lines of it below:
))
))
))
))
))
Damn filter error! Doesn't let me post this comment, so ignore this sentence; treat it like an IBM manual with "this page intentionally left blank" written on it
But that's a terrible analogy - aside for having no cars at all in it, most people win this lottery. When you have say, 20% saying "the system is rigged, it's all a scam", 60% working and content, and 20% saying "this sucks, but it's my own fault", it's hard to justify the first group.
It's equally hard to justify saying "it's their own damn fault" when such a large number of people are falling into the first and third categories.
Look, when I was young the single biggest thing keeping me down was the idea that a regular full-time job was some sort of scam, and it was only once I got over that that my life went anywhere.
Well, I thought that way twenty years ago, and I still think that way, and I'm still mostly a success. It's just that now I see more clearly how the powerful and influential wield their power - when I was young I never had such depth of thought. So, I decided that I'd simply try to become one of "them", and that's working out quite well :)
I see a lot of people who expected to just walk into a middle-class lifestyle straight out of college, and who are upset there's no "good" job waiting for them.
I haven't seen that in the last ten years; my perception matches just about everyone else who replied to you. To whit, there are no jobs, except for a few lucky enough to be connected (where I am unemployment is around the 25% mark, with you unemployment closer to 60%. A full 80% of graduating high-schoolers don't get jobs immediately after finishing school, thus they cannot finance themselves into a college.
It doesn't work that way - but that doesn't mean the "good" job doesn't exist, just that college didn't get you there, there are more steps to take first.
Look, I come from a poor background (think typical African township, with poultry flapping around when cars backfire and children running barefoot in dirt roads). When I left high-school I was lucky enough to get a job in a textile factory (working 7 nights a week, from 19h00 to 07h00) for around $20 USD a week. The only way to survive was to continue living with my parents. I used the income from that job to embark on a correspondence study course, and after the first year of computer science and maths was lucky enough to be hired at the local university. From there on in I just jumped from job to job every five years or so, upgrading each time.
However, I acknowledge that I was lucky to get that first job. Many of my mates from high-school only got jobs years later (some never - they did the best they could growing vegetables and whatnot). Had I not gotten lucky with that first factory job then I wouldn't have been here today typing this and trying to convince you that, no, it's not just your mindset, it's mostly luck when you're young. When there are 200 qualified applicants for 2 positions, then it merely comes down to who gets lucky.
Perhaps you're not actually reading (in which case I'm not sure this will help) but what I'm yelling is: "I did it, so can you".
I think that perhaps you are missing the point; let me try to explain via analogy.
In this particular story, set in a poor world, there is a lottery, that pays out enough to keep the winner in money for life. Everyone enters the lottery, every week. There is only one winner, and one week it is our friend (you) and he is yelling as hard as he can "Hey everybody! I did it, so can you!!!" and he does not understand why everyone thinks that he is retarded for making that argument. He just cannot understand why everyone is moaning about not having money, when it is so simple to him: just win the lottery, like he did. He also cannot understand why the other people just don't understand what he is saying. Why do they keep complaining about not having money when all they have to do is win the lottery?
I hope you get the point now; if you don't, then there is no hope for you.
Copenhagen restaurant Noma have won "Best Restaurant" a few times, on a menu that included candied ants.
Frankly, what restaurant snobs think is good has no correlation to what normal folk find disgusting.
While two wrongs do not make a right, the law is not about right or wrong. The reason courts place so much emphasis on precedence is to ensure that the law is dispensed fairly - so if someone in the past got X years in jail for committing activity Y with characterstics Y.a, Y.b ... Y.z, then it's only fair that the next person who did Y with Y.a ... Y.z should get a similar sentence.
Let me emphasise: The law is not about doing no wrong, so we don't care if the second wrong doesn't make it right; we only care if the second wrong makes it fair.
I think it's hunter2
First IT people should start with not needing to change my password every month. That will make me select a safer one, because I can remember it.
We do that because the assumption has to be that given enough time, your password will be compromised. The longer you have to wait to change it, the longer the window of exposure when that happens.
Yes. Because of course an attacker that has only had the password for the last 29 days neglected to install backdoors and keypress-capture software in the 29 days that he had access to the system, so of course you should change the password before the attacker installs the malware on the 31st day of compromise.
Is it any wonder, with that 29-day logic, that normal intelligent people regard IT people as slightly retarded? The 29-day policy forces easily guessable dictionary passwords with incrementing numbers somewhere in them, preventing the normal computer user from ever picking a good password. Face it, any system that's been compromised will, within a few minutes, have all its future passwords compromised as well, until such time that the system is purged of all malware. Whether your "assumption" is compromised-within-a-month or a compromised-within-a-day, expiring passwords have no actual effect on security.
No, it's not new or novel, but it's exactly what I proposed... you can already mix your own tags into HTML and style and process them.
Did something like this and was meaning to write up a blog post about this but never got around to it (hey, there's a weekend coming up :)
Feel free to read the rest of the directory for the actual implementation.
As far as food goes, it's "need".
I will concede that it is possible, in a technologically advanced society (as we find ourselves in), to, with much expense and effort, replace the meat portion of our diet and supplement a vegetarian diet with pills with only a negligible drop in the nutrition a body gets, but that option is not available to many, nor is it desirable to many of those that it is available to.
But the activists still have a point -- the animals do regain freedom.
Yup. If I get kicked out of my place in the middle of winter and die in the snow and ice, at least I would have regained my freedom...
To protest using animals to advance understanding of disease is, well, to put it bluntly, moronic.
but it's hard to deny that the consumer-derived 'cloud sharing' stuff frequently beats the IT department on usability and convenience.
Quattro Pro and Wordstar on MSDOS 6.0 beats almost anything the IT department offers in terms of usability and convenience.
It's kind of like watching the functional programming people slowly reinvent OOP...makes me scream inside. "Dude, we've figured out a new way to organize our methods / fields so that it's easier to keep them straight in our heads..." "Please God, let it not be OOP." "*talks for a bit*" "Damn it."
I find it quite funny when the OO-crowd goes off like this :-)
(In case no one else clues you in: you've got it backward - Functional came first, and gave the world OO. OO now constantly reinvents everything that lisp had, under the guise of "new and improved")
It is, in fact, very restrictive. If one wants truly free software, one uses a more free license or makes one's code public domain.
I have to respond to this: while I release my stuff (well, much of it) under BSD[1], such as the stuff in my sig below, I never considered that GPL was "restrictive" in any way. It's the creators right to decide how people should redistribute their creations, and if a creator decides that other creators who modify the creation must also release their modifications, then so be it ... there is nothing at all restrictive about asking that people who change your creations and then distribute the changed creations must also allow others to modify the derived creation.
That being said, I tend to use BSD because:
1. Less confusion; only two paragraphs to read
2. I want people to use my stuff and give me credit. BSD let's me do that. I don't care if they modify my stuff and then distribute for a profit - as long as they take care to provide credit to me as the licence requires I'm all good.
3. GPL turns off potential users (remember that contributors are users first, before becoming contributors!) and I'm usually aiming for as many users as possible.
BSD software stands a reasonably high chance (compared to GPL) of getting integrated into a major piece of commercial software. This provides additional avenues of income to me by raising my profile. The value provided by being credited (for example) by Google as a contributor is much much more than I would hope to get from simply releasing my little libraries and experiments for monetary gain or reciprocal sharing.
The only value I can possibly gain from GPL is from the reciprocal sharing, when people contribute code back to my project. That value is too little compared to the value I will gain in raised profile when the code is integrated into a successfull (or not) commercial product.
[1] Some of the older stuff is under GPL as I don't want to maintain them and am hoping someone takes them over.
If people would just stop harping on Metro, (honestly, you don't even see it 95% of the time if you open only a single application at a time and then proceed to do no work)
That's more accurate, unfortunately.
(If you'd like to read more email me; I'm about 75% done with a tiny eBook on money and it's development. There will eventually be a bitcoin section in there).
I'd never pay for your eBook with Bitcoin, but I do have a nice sack of potatoes here.
I might not accept bitcoins, but I will certainly accept potatoes :)
You really don't get it, do you?
I assure you that I do. I'm not blinded by fanaticism as you seem to be. It doesn't matter how many well-reasoned arguments I've thrown your way, you simply ignore them and repeat the bitcoin party-line. Here's a tip - all those things you are spouting that you think are so new and novel that make bitcoin a currency? The world has heard it all before - we've seen this movie before. It's only new to you.
Bitcoin can be divided into two 0.5BTC pieces, or into 10,000 0.0001BTC pieces harmlessly and it doesn't cease to be a currency that way.
Actually, yes it does. Plus, you don't understand it at all, as is evidenced by you switching your argument to divisibility from trading. Bitcoins suffer from the same shortfalls that gold does, as a currency. No amount of whining in the world is going to change that I'm afraid. We've been through this before.
Please include the part about bitcoin being infinitely divisible and cheap to transport in your ebook.
Ok.
"Dividing the currency currently in existence to ensure that more people can have some of it makes the current holders of that currency much richer without them needing to do anything".
It's now included. You can't simply divide the currency when you run out - that makes some people richer for no good reason, leading to hording, which turns even normal currency (which bitcoin isn't right now) into a commodity. The minute you "divide" a currency into smaller units for normal trading purposes it stops being a currency.
I'd like to see your conversation with the salesperson at a checkout point of a supermarket with you trying to pay for other purchased goods (of matching value) with a bag of potatoes.
It would be the same conversation that would occur were I to try paying with bitcoins.
Which brings us in a rather circular way back to the original point: there is no practical difference between someone accepting payment in bitcoins and someone accepting payment in a bag of potatoes. "Accepting payment in $FOO" doesn't make $FOO a currency, or money or tender of any sort. Criteria for what constitutes a currency is high enough that it disqualifies precious metals, after all. Bitcoin doesn't (yet?) satisfy the criteria for being a currency.
Now, it's possible that in the future bitcoins will satisfy the criteria for being a currency and everyone will trade in it ... then you run into the same problem that we ran into with precious metals and cowrie shells: there is no match between the "currency" and the value it is supposed to represent (which is why precious metals were eventually abandoned as currencies).
Ironically, by following the same model used by precious metals (mining a finite resource at a specified and hard-to-change rate), bitcoins are doomed to be abandoned as currencies too ... that's if they ever get adopted as currrencies - but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and say that it will one day achieve critical mass and take off, only to be shot down later when it runs into the same problems that gold and silver and diamonds and bronze and tools and cowrie shells and cows and goats and poultry ran into.
(If you'd like to read more email me; I'm about 75% done with a tiny eBook on money and it's development. There will eventually be a bitcoin section in there).
You can get a bag of potatoes for dollars at one market, then go to another and get ice cream for your bag of potatoes?
Perhaps not ice-cream, but certainly something else. Maybe even money if I feel so inclined.
Sorry, but currency works both ways.
As I pointed out above, so do potatoes (and any number of different things). Also, they can always be exchanged for money too.
Increasingly more sites will both pay and accept bitcoin.
I fail to be convinced just yet. Merchants hate volatility.
You should ask the people of the B-Ark how well their unlimited currency worked out for them. As I recall, before the drastic measures kicked in, it took roughly 3 forests in order to buy one ships peanut.
And with built-in scarcity at a creation rate that tends towards zero, you'll have the opposite extreme: it'll take a fraction of a single molecule of the leaf of a tree to purchase an entire planet. What's needed is some sort of in-between; an ability to match the rate to the value societal output. This is, of course, why currencies cannot be backed by gold or silver - there is no way to adjust the value easily if societal output changes. It's also why bitcoin isn't a good currency.
you can exchange it for other currencies or goods & services, how exactly is it a fake currency?
Down at the local market I can exchange potatoes for other currencies or goods & services; that doesn't make potatoes a real currency though. Bitcoins are commodities. Nothing more, nothing less.