Re:Server down for obvious reasons
on
Blender Is GPL
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· Score: 2
>/. operates just fine on MySQL. It's hardly ever down.
If you had been here for long enough you would remember that many of the problem/. had in various times were indeed related to either MySQL directly, or to convoluted coding made necessary by its deficiencies.
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It's faster [mysql.com] than most other databases because it's leaner.
It is only faster if you take it as an isolated factor. If you compose it with all the additional coding that it requires, besides lack of scalability and additional system administration work required, it ends up being much slower both to deploy and in performance.
Re:Server down for obvious reasons
on
Blender Is GPL
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· Score: 2
>
The problem is with the programmers, web designers and db developers
Agreed. But then, when one is a good systems engineer, he chooses a real DBMS in order to avoid too much coding, data inconsistencies and other issues that MySQL fails to address. That is, MySQL here is more of a symptom of shoddy work done with good intentions.
Re:Why oh why are you such a snob?
on
Blender Is GPL
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· Score: 2
>
What makes you so sure that MySQL was the source of the problem?
I take MySQL to be more a symptom than a cause here. And the symptom is being unable to think a system as a whole.
To be more precise, programming bums will fail to see the need to code less and more simply, to do proper systems administration, to use well a real DBMS.
Re:Server down for obvious reasons
on
Blender Is GPL
·
· Score: 2
>
What fetures of a "real DBMS" would have helped in this case?
All of them, and reliability and scalability too.
The point here is that by using MySQL one must to by coding much that should be done declaratively in and by the DBMS. The whole becomes bigger, slower, less reliable, even if the pseudo-DBMS itself seems faster when seen in isolation.
Server down for obvious reasons
on
Blender Is GPL
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
As usual, and as with/. itself, the weakest link is MySQL. Why oh why our free software community is so infatuated with programming that it cannot see the importance of using a real DBMS?
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when we vote this Democratic majority out of power (we never voted it into power in the first place!)
For the benefit of people who are not in the USNA, would you care to expand on the supposed illegitimacy of your current Senate? A good URL would suffice.
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As for the automated HR systems, they'll reject my resume every time.
Have you read Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr?
It features, among other gadgets of a fully-automated USNA, what you are calling resumatics. In the history, it has the effect of keeping talented but disadjusted people out of the system. As in your case, in the story the disadjusted are the only sane people, but then, as the story takes the idea ad absurdum, they have no place in the economy at all. Thus they begin a Luddite revolution, together with people who do are accepted but feel unhappy about the whole thing. The revolution ultimately fails because the same people who started it end up using they creativity to fix the same machines they destroyed...
In real life, this could be part of the suicide mode big corporations tend to switch into once they start to keep insisting on missing the Cluetrain.
One could buy a second-hand UltraSPARC from a second-tier vendor. It is new hardware from Sun which is expensive, but there are other vendors of UltraSPARC systems, and there are refurbished systems.
He could be a cop and have access to run it or copy it from his own work.
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you refuse to admit that proprietary software is the best choice for most regular users because the hassle of using open source software outweighs the freedom you gain by using it.
Using is no hassle. Setting it up is. Preinstalling does the trick, or good system administration in office settings. And anyway, freedom, reliability and security are higher values than convenience, were it not for this instant gratification age of ours.
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It is absoltutely NOT worthwile to sacrifice some functionality so that we can all pledge allegience to the GPL.
Once again, no functionality is sacrificed, only convenience. And lot else is gained besides freedom, including functionality. Please try to prove me wrong.
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you're trying to tell us all that Microsoft is not a profitable corporation because of some link to a very obscure website.
What has obscurity to do with it? The guy either is wrong, or right. Read it and form your own opinion. Hint: since 1.99[78] the guy has been telling the world MS has questionable accounting. Incidentally, some of these accounting practices are involved in Enron's downfall.
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I think in this current environment of discovering accounting tricks that Microsoft's own tricks would have been uncovered by now if they had any.
How old are you, what's your background? Life isn't so simple. MS has big lobby, and huge advertisement budget. Press is owned by groups that have a vested interest in not rocking the boat. Journalists understand little of technology or finance, so investigative reports are mostly done in unrelated areas of "human interest", politics or ecology.
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I do know they settled recently with the SEC but I cannot remember exactly what for
This is an unrelated issue. Anyway, after Enron and WorldCom a SEC settlement isn't anymore a good behaviour certificate.
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I DO know that the situation wasn't so grave as to switch their status from on of a profitable corp to an unprofitable one.
C'mon, you don't remember the issue you refer to, and you didn't care to read Parish's paper. MS is in the red since 1.995. It doesn't appear in the statements because they have been charging stock options as expenses for tax purposes but not for taxes. If they are charged as expenses, the red ink appears. If they aren't, paying taxes would also have sent them to the deep red ink ocean.
Either you addresses the points I raised, or I will simply ignore your next replies, the current one being just reaffirmation of already proffered unfounded convictions.
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The production of art wasn't that high, since not that many people could afford to patrons
It isn't yet and never will be. Most of what gets peddled as art is narcisist and boring on one side, or mass consumption narcisist trash on the other. To do art requires not only talent, but discipline, sensibility, willingness to serve one's work and to communicate it with the world.
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It requires a huge, empty gap between the median and highest incomes.
Well, this gap has always existed and will always be there, simply because most people can't be bothered to try to become rich, and many couldn't for their lives. But that it is required is doubtful: enterprises, governments, foundations are also patrons. And sure the gap needn't be empty, why it should?
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So how would this work with Free software? I'd imaging that there would be a virtual firm consisting of interface designers and programmers.
There are many such entities, from small consulting groups to the big non-profits that develop several projects. For instance, SPI helps develop Debian and other projects; you can donate to SPI, or to the FSF, or to the Apache Group or to a BSD team...
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They, for political reasons, would probably have to fork the code.
Nonsense. If you can show you are doing the right thing, you are allowed to do what you want. If you aren't, it is highly probable your fork will become the standard version, as happened with egcs and others.
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if anyone else wants to form one of these Free software design firms, I'm game.
Do your homework, several such exist. But you must be good, and show you are worthy, before joining.
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Open source rules, and is an inherently better way to develop software
As long as you keep thinking about OpenSource and "a [...] better way to develop" you will miss the freedom point. It is sure worthwhile to sacrifice some convenience for freedom, specially when all functionality is actually available, even if perhaps not quite as conveniently.
Also, your "dialog-propaganda-as-reasoning" is flawed, because a you fail to mention any real functionality that you suppose to be missing, and because it ignores the point that, for all licensing fees one has to pay, he would probably get all the convenience he wants plus more functionality than proprietary software offers, not to mention standards-compliance -- and thus the actual ownership and control over one's own data -- and freedom, which is a convenience in itself.
I see many reasons why some people don't see the problems of proprietary software. They don't pay for the software they daily use and thus ignore its real price and cost, they don't abide by the license terms they are supposed to; they don't really understand the security, reliability, privacy and data accessibility issues; they don't realise the biggest proprietary software company isn't profitable and consequently hasn't yet proved its practical viability.
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where are my multiple master fonts, or fonts with professional ligatures and weighting?
The rest is just more of the same. If just a fraction of what users spend on licensing was directed to create, say, free fonts, then we would have had them for a long time now. But you miss a point: fonts are not software. They can be created with free software, they can be distributed gratis together with free software, but they are, in the end, data. They do not infringe on freedom as much as proprietary software, or rather not at all, as long as the font format in itself remains public.
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You just need to learn C++ and programming with a GUI toolkit, plus a few other things.
Now you are trolling. You know the Gimp can be programmed in Scheme, and that is as easy as it gets short of hiring programmers. Which is what should be done in the first place anyway.
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The solutions you're providing are workarrounds and more effort than is required to just install the original application natively.
Not so simple.
What I am saying is, no need to keep each desktop. Give people X terminals. They will be able to access all applications from servers, and never know it -- because they have the icons and menus as if they had everything locally installed. It would not make a difference if the program was free or proprietary, POSIX or MS-W32, it would be there. Obviously no need to pay or pirate proprietary software where free would do, and many gaps can be filled if people would, say, contribute a fraction of their potential MS licensing fees to, say, CMYK support in the Gimp or free fonts.
See? No workarounds needed at an office. At home, people still would want things preinstalled. Debian to the people: once installed, it just runs, and is easy to maintain. Preinstallation takes lots of pain out of the equation. Why, naive users cannot install even MS-W32!
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could you find us a XTerm version of the real estate software that we run on client PC's individually?
MS Windows Terminal Server, or Citrix, or even Wine and X Windows.
X Terminal is a terminal running a X server to display windows from a X Window System client. A Citrix or MS RDP client will work the same, but less flexible and proprietary.
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give them open source software and they STILL ask me why the stuff doesn't "WORK RIGHT NOW"? Should my response each time they ask be, "In due time, at least now you have freedom!"?
Do your homework. Software does exist, or can be contracted out if protocols, file formats and APIs are documented. Your lack of awareness about the X Window System and MS-WTS certainly shows you've done no homework.
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you as a Debian user and or coder would approach this issue from a political point of view instead of a common sensical and practical usage one. I had thought you might have been able to rise above it however.
This wouldn't be rising, but sinking. And beware, those who don't care for freedom are doomed to misuse and even loose it.
My mistake, should have been MS-W16. What was known as the MS Win16 API and associated plaftorm, meaning from MS Windows 2.X 386 to MS Windows for Workgroups 3.11.
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Unfortunately you are too close to the problem to recognize that you are a part of the problem.
Or perhaps I know something you don't...
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Most people want to simply get their work done, NOW, and not in "due time" as you so casually put it.
The thing is, there isn't a thing that can't be done, *now*, in free software. Most people use their computers as very expensive, error prone typewriters-cum-calculators. On the contrary, in the corporation X Terminals can do everything PCs can, at lower cost, better security, less failures.
Now if you are talking computers at home, it still holds. Even the proprietary software companies could have systems almost as capable as today's, but with far less security and reliability problems. Just that they got a severe case of Featuritis and wasted years of POSIX work by creating their own, proprietary APIs and stuff.
The rest of you reply is so misinformed as to be useless, not meriting even refutation. But here it goes: GNU/Hurd is an experiment that lost its urgency when BSD and GNU/Linux got released as free software. Apache is not unuseable, it is just that some modules outside of the core are still being tested. Gnome 1.4 is bad, but 2 is not related to Red Hat's nullified version. It is the result of hard work by Red Hat, plus Sun, plus Ximian, plus the community.
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When I go to work everyday I don't see one user bitching about how the software they use is not "free".
Because they were not educated in freedom. Neither in freedom nor in costs, security and reliability.
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If I were to replace the software we use with open source everything however I'm pretty sure I'd get an earful on why doesn't anything "WORK" anymore.
And that would be just lack of familiarity. Just how the transition from Mac OS 9 to X ruffled quite a few feathers, and from MS-DOS to MS-W16 and from MS-W13 to MS-W32, and from there to MS-WNT.
No. Apache, GNU/Hurd, Gnome are just some examples of free software projects owned, developed and maintained by committees.
The tyrant vs committee thing is just a thoughtless, misinformation propaganda sound bite. The real points are:
Trade-offs. MS-W32 useability was traded-off against security and freedom, Mac OS X user-friendliness was traded off agains popularity and freedom. This are trade-offs that should never have been made. It would be better to have less popular and less friendly software, granted it was fundamentally sound. This would have allowed for building better user interfaces in due time.
End-user focus. The Linux kernel, the Apache server, and many other projects simply have no business with the naïve end-user who wants a Graphical User Interface. This is a business for Gnome, GNUStep, KDE, Motif and the like of them.
Unfortunately, the Brasilian electronic voting system reliability and security are flawed. Brasilians are trusting it more out of hope in fundamental human goodness and general political progress, meaning sure, no one will attempt electoral fraud nowadays, coupled to general technical illiteracy, than because it was proven good. Because it was not.
Only a few computerised ballots leave a paper trail for vote audit. Many of them run a customised MS WinCE version. There were only five days to only a few accredit technicians from the political parties to audit the whole kabooza. Requests for proper auditing went unheeded by the electoral authorities, which are astoundingly technical illiterate and moreover refuse to educate themselves.
>
Are you aware that each IVF procedure produces multiple embryos? Some of which are not viable for a pregnancy? Of the ones viable for pregnancy (typically 8-10), around 3-4 are implanted into the uterus and the rest frozen. Later the parents can decide if they want another pregnancy to use the frozen embryos (which are typically available for 5 years).
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In 5 years, the parents have the option of releasing the embryos to other couples (sort of like an embryo adoption).
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Now what happens to the embryos that are not viable and to the frozen embryos that nobody wants to adopt?
You got it. They become biological waste.
Thank you, you just stated my case against In-Vitro Fertilization. It can be even more murderous than abortion itself. Besides being apalling the egotism that makes people spend so much money in IVF while they could adopt Third-World orphans and abandoned children whose lack of real families would make criminals or condemned to extreme poverty.
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on the education issue, for the kinds of economic, climatic, infrastructural issues that Brazil has to contend with, I think they are doing a suprisngly good job.
Problem is, we are not. Do not let statistics fool you. Schooling quality is so poor in Brasil, even if most children do attend school they are functionally illiterate -- meaning they do know the alphabet, can sign their own names and perhaps read the headlines in popular newspapers and advertisement, but cannot do any kind of text interpretation nor write passably for their lifes.
There are many causes for this, from the humdrum economical ones to the more fundamental cultural and religious, and I will not explain them here. But education is so much more than instruction, and it does begin with families. See this speech by a NY teacher, for instance. Add to that Brasilian families typically having absent fathers, in addition to other weaknesses, and you have the beginning of an explanation.
That actually pisses me off, so many me too languages that do not quit get near Lisp capabilities, trying to have some feature or other without catching on the underlying concepts and power of the real thing. Granted they are useful enough on themselves, but mostly by being more procedural or OO, thus catering to our minds already spoiled by Basic, C and similars.
Any sufficiently-complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming. And yes, Python qualifies as a C program... better to learn the real thing, IMNSHO.
Why go for C++ and all its complications? Objective C is cleaner, and if using the GNUStep framework easily portable to the Mac OS X.
Obviously, if you want to Do The Right Thing you might want to use a really relational database and code in Lisp, but I do not know if that is practical already. At least the Lisp part is for sure, and one can always go to SQL as a second-best and stopgap to a real relational system.
That is only true if you assume someone is already familiar with Perl and procedural, structured programming. For a lay person Lisp is as great and easy a programming language as one could wish, and far more powerfull too.
All things considered, the original argument by RMS is still valid. If one is gonna need a language, why not learn the one more powerful language in the world, that happens also to be among the oldest and easier to read? Lisp all the way...
Slashdot Mirror
If you had been here for long enough you would remember that many of the problem /. had in various times were indeed related to either MySQL directly, or to convoluted coding made necessary by its deficiencies.
It is only faster if you take it as an isolated factor. If you compose it with all the additional coding that it requires, besides lack of scalability and additional system administration work required, it ends up being much slower both to deploy and in performance.
Agreed. But then, when one is a good systems engineer, he chooses a real DBMS in order to avoid too much coding, data inconsistencies and other issues that MySQL fails to address. That is, MySQL here is more of a symptom of shoddy work done with good intentions.
I take MySQL to be more a symptom than a cause here. And the symptom is being unable to think a system as a whole.
To be more precise, programming bums will fail to see the need to code less and more simply, to do proper systems administration, to use well a real DBMS.
All of them, and reliability and scalability too.
The point here is that by using MySQL one must to by coding much that should be done declaratively in and by the DBMS. The whole becomes bigger, slower, less reliable, even if the pseudo-DBMS itself seems faster when seen in isolation.
As usual, and as with /. itself, the weakest link is MySQL. Why oh why our free software community is so infatuated with programming that it cannot see the importance of using a real DBMS?
For the benefit of people who are not in the USNA, would you care to expand on the supposed illegitimacy of your current Senate? A good URL would suffice.
Have you read Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr?
It features, among other gadgets of a fully-automated USNA, what you are calling resumatics. In the history, it has the effect of keeping talented but disadjusted people out of the system. As in your case, in the story the disadjusted are the only sane people, but then, as the story takes the idea ad absurdum, they have no place in the economy at all. Thus they begin a Luddite revolution, together with people who do are accepted but feel unhappy about the whole thing. The revolution ultimately fails because the same people who started it end up using they creativity to fix the same machines they destroyed...
In real life, this could be part of the suicide mode big corporations tend to switch into once they start to keep insisting on missing the Cluetrain.
There is a MS-WNT port.
One could buy a second-hand UltraSPARC from a second-tier vendor. It is new hardware from Sun which is expensive, but there are other vendors of UltraSPARC systems, and there are refurbished systems.
He could be a cop and have access to run it or copy it from his own work.
Using is no hassle. Setting it up is. Preinstalling does the trick, or good system administration in office settings. And anyway, freedom, reliability and security are higher values than convenience, were it not for this instant gratification age of ours.
Once again, no functionality is sacrificed, only convenience. And lot else is gained besides freedom, including functionality. Please try to prove me wrong.
What has obscurity to do with it? The guy either is wrong, or right. Read it and form your own opinion. Hint: since 1.99[78] the guy has been telling the world MS has questionable accounting. Incidentally, some of these accounting practices are involved in Enron's downfall.
How old are you, what's your background? Life isn't so simple. MS has big lobby, and huge advertisement budget. Press is owned by groups that have a vested interest in not rocking the boat. Journalists understand little of technology or finance, so investigative reports are mostly done in unrelated areas of "human interest", politics or ecology.
This is an unrelated issue. Anyway, after Enron and WorldCom a SEC settlement isn't anymore a good behaviour certificate.
C'mon, you don't remember the issue you refer to, and you didn't care to read Parish's paper. MS is in the red since 1.995. It doesn't appear in the statements because they have been charging stock options as expenses for tax purposes but not for taxes. If they are charged as expenses, the red ink appears. If they aren't, paying taxes would also have sent them to the deep red ink ocean.
Either you addresses the points I raised, or I will simply ignore your next replies, the current one being just reaffirmation of already proffered unfounded convictions.
It isn't yet and never will be. Most of what gets peddled as art is narcisist and boring on one side, or mass consumption narcisist trash on the other. To do art requires not only talent, but discipline, sensibility, willingness to serve one's work and to communicate it with the world.
Well, this gap has always existed and will always be there, simply because most people can't be bothered to try to become rich, and many couldn't for their lives. But that it is required is doubtful: enterprises, governments, foundations are also patrons. And sure the gap needn't be empty, why it should?
There are many such entities, from small consulting groups to the big non-profits that develop several projects. For instance, SPI helps develop Debian and other projects; you can donate to SPI, or to the FSF, or to the Apache Group or to a BSD team...
Nonsense. If you can show you are doing the right thing, you are allowed to do what you want. If you aren't, it is highly probable your fork will become the standard version, as happened with egcs and others.
Do your homework, several such exist. But you must be good, and show you are worthy, before joining.
As long as you keep thinking about OpenSource and "a [...] better way to develop" you will miss the freedom point. It is sure worthwhile to sacrifice some convenience for freedom, specially when all functionality is actually available, even if perhaps not quite as conveniently.
Also, your "dialog-propaganda-as-reasoning" is flawed, because a you fail to mention any real functionality that you suppose to be missing, and because it ignores the point that, for all licensing fees one has to pay, he would probably get all the convenience he wants plus more functionality than proprietary software offers, not to mention standards-compliance -- and thus the actual ownership and control over one's own data -- and freedom, which is a convenience in itself.
I see many reasons why some people don't see the problems of proprietary software. They don't pay for the software they daily use and thus ignore its real price and cost, they don't abide by the license terms they are supposed to; they don't really understand the security, reliability, privacy and data accessibility issues; they don't realise the biggest proprietary software company isn't profitable and consequently hasn't yet proved its practical viability.
Old facts die hard, huh?
The rest is just more of the same. If just a fraction of what users spend on licensing was directed to create, say, free fonts, then we would have had them for a long time now. But you miss a point: fonts are not software. They can be created with free software, they can be distributed gratis together with free software, but they are, in the end, data. They do not infringe on freedom as much as proprietary software, or rather not at all, as long as the font format in itself remains public.
Now you are trolling. You know the Gimp can be programmed in Scheme, and that is as easy as it gets short of hiring programmers. Which is what should be done in the first place anyway.
Not so simple.
What I am saying is, no need to keep each desktop. Give people X terminals. They will be able to access all applications from servers, and never know it -- because they have the icons and menus as if they had everything locally installed. It would not make a difference if the program was free or proprietary, POSIX or MS-W32, it would be there. Obviously no need to pay or pirate proprietary software where free would do, and many gaps can be filled if people would, say, contribute a fraction of their potential MS licensing fees to, say, CMYK support in the Gimp or free fonts.
See? No workarounds needed at an office. At home, people still would want things preinstalled. Debian to the people: once installed, it just runs, and is easy to maintain. Preinstallation takes lots of pain out of the equation. Why, naive users cannot install even MS-W32!
In an age of Relativism, every conviction solidly sustained gets called intolerance. But name calling doesn't make reality.
That is what being a leader, or simply a man of opinions and ideals, means.
MS Windows Terminal Server, or Citrix, or even Wine and X Windows.
X Terminal is a terminal running a X server to display windows from a X Window System client. A Citrix or MS RDP client will work the same, but less flexible and proprietary.
Do your homework. Software does exist, or can be contracted out if protocols, file formats and APIs are documented. Your lack of awareness about the X Window System and MS-WTS certainly shows you've done no homework.
This wouldn't be rising, but sinking. And beware, those who don't care for freedom are doomed to misuse and even loose it.
My mistake, should have been MS-W16. What was known as the MS Win16 API and associated plaftorm, meaning from MS Windows 2.X 386 to MS Windows for Workgroups 3.11.
Citrix and its little sibling, MS-WTS, work with any application that can be run on a MS-WNT server.
Or perhaps I know something you don't...
The thing is, there isn't a thing that can't be done, *now*, in free software. Most people use their computers as very expensive, error prone typewriters-cum-calculators. On the contrary, in the corporation X Terminals can do everything PCs can, at lower cost, better security, less failures.
Now if you are talking computers at home, it still holds. Even the proprietary software companies could have systems almost as capable as today's, but with far less security and reliability problems. Just that they got a severe case of Featuritis and wasted years of POSIX work by creating their own, proprietary APIs and stuff.
The rest of you reply is so misinformed as to be useless, not meriting even refutation. But here it goes: GNU/Hurd is an experiment that lost its urgency when BSD and GNU/Linux got released as free software. Apache is not unuseable, it is just that some modules outside of the core are still being tested. Gnome 1.4 is bad, but 2 is not related to Red Hat's nullified version. It is the result of hard work by Red Hat, plus Sun, plus Ximian, plus the community.
Because they were not educated in freedom. Neither in freedom nor in costs, security and reliability.
And that would be just lack of familiarity. Just how the transition from Mac OS 9 to X ruffled quite a few feathers, and from MS-DOS to MS-W16 and from MS-W13 to MS-W32, and from there to MS-WNT.
No. Apache, GNU/Hurd, Gnome are just some examples of free software projects owned, developed and maintained by committees.
The tyrant vs committee thing is just a thoughtless, misinformation propaganda sound bite. The real points are:
Trade-offs. MS-W32 useability was traded-off against security and freedom, Mac OS X user-friendliness was traded off agains popularity and freedom. This are trade-offs that should never have been made. It would be better to have less popular and less friendly software, granted it was fundamentally sound. This would have allowed for building better user interfaces in due time.
End-user focus. The Linux kernel, the Apache server, and many other projects simply have no business with the naïve end-user who wants a Graphical User Interface. This is a business for Gnome, GNUStep, KDE, Motif and the like of them.
Unfortunately, the Brasilian electronic voting system reliability and security are flawed. Brasilians are trusting it more out of hope in fundamental human goodness and general political progress, meaning sure, no one will attempt electoral fraud nowadays, coupled to general technical illiteracy, than because it was proven good. Because it was not.
Only a few computerised ballots leave a paper trail for vote audit. Many of them run a customised MS WinCE version. There were only five days to only a few accredit technicians from the political parties to audit the whole kabooza. Requests for proper auditing went unheeded by the electoral authorities, which are astoundingly technical illiterate and moreover refuse to educate themselves.
Here are a proven flaw on the self-auditing portion of the system, a first-person account of the absurdity of the audit attempt, and an analysis of some failures in the auditing process. All in Portuguese, use the Fish!
Thank you, you just stated my case against In-Vitro Fertilization. It can be even more murderous than abortion itself. Besides being apalling the egotism that makes people spend so much money in IVF while they could adopt Third-World orphans and abandoned children whose lack of real families would make criminals or condemned to extreme poverty.
Problem is, we are not. Do not let statistics fool you. Schooling quality is so poor in Brasil, even if most children do attend school they are functionally illiterate -- meaning they do know the alphabet, can sign their own names and perhaps read the headlines in popular newspapers and advertisement, but cannot do any kind of text interpretation nor write passably for their lifes.
There are many causes for this, from the humdrum economical ones to the more fundamental cultural and religious, and I will not explain them here. But education is so much more than instruction, and it does begin with families. See this speech by a NY teacher, for instance. Add to that Brasilian families typically having absent fathers, in addition to other weaknesses, and you have the beginning of an explanation.
That actually pisses me off, so many me too languages that do not quit get near Lisp capabilities, trying to have some feature or other without catching on the underlying concepts and power of the real thing. Granted they are useful enough on themselves, but mostly by being more procedural or OO, thus catering to our minds already spoiled by Basic, C and similars.
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming. And yes, Python qualifies as a C program... better to learn the real thing, IMNSHO.
Why go for C++ and all its complications? Objective C is cleaner, and if using the GNUStep framework easily portable to the Mac OS X.
Obviously, if you want to Do The Right Thing you might want to use a really relational database and code in Lisp, but I do not know if that is practical already. At least the Lisp part is for sure, and one can always go to SQL as a second-best and stopgap to a real relational system.
That is only true if you assume someone is already familiar with Perl and procedural, structured programming. For a lay person Lisp is as great and easy a programming language as one could wish, and far more powerfull too.
All things considered, the original argument by RMS is still valid. If one is gonna need a language, why not learn the one more powerful language in the world, that happens also to be among the oldest and easier to read? Lisp all the way...