What's really important for us to realize is that we're a favored group of the working people, but we are not immune to how the current system treats workers, and we need to look at our impact on others.
We haven't taken this recession quite so much on the chin as blue-collar workers; jobs may be on the rise again, but not well-paying jobs for most. In the meantime, those landlords who are charging high rents in tech-heavy cities? They're making life hard for us, but nigh well impossible to other people. That gentrification is displacing people of less means, often people with roots and community. Watching the Mission in San Francisco become a place that the Latino culture that gave it its character could scarcely hang on made me really think about this. I had occasion to have a bunch of housemates who worked in the restaurants, and they were barely hanging on financially, a non-stop cliffhanger. Seems to me we're enabling a racket.
I for my part have chosen to build a tiny house, get a mobile hotspot, telecommute, and work on scaling my lifestyle to my actual needs. Landlords don't usually offer that; they're trying to oversell as much as anyone, and to as generic an audience as possible. We could work on changing that. I see people turning to community land trusts to try to keep housing possible for low-income people. It's hard for artists that make San Francisco to remain there without such measures, at this point. If we in IT gave this our energy too, we'd be keeping more of what we toil so many hours for, but it'd give momentum to something that's a lifeline to others. I'd rather not just work long hours to give the landlords incentive to evict the artists that made me want to live somewhere to begin with!
In short, we're in the business of being problem solvers at work; if we do this for ourselves and the communities we're in or neighbors too, it could change a lot of this.
And here I bought these vintage-incandescent LED bulbs with warm glowy yellow "filaments" for nothing. They were right on the shelf and everything, and I didn't even read a cool headline about 'em. What a rip-off!;)
I've been running Linux for nearly all of the last four years, and a majority of my computing hours since 1998, and this stuff's why. I won't let it touch baremetal anymore. Microsoft will download 6GB behind my back? I run on a connection with a 20GB monthly cap! That is completely unacceptable. I wonder when customers are going to cease handing control of their systems to something that's going to do MS marketing's bidding behind their back.
Currently there are clear incompatibilities between the computing power that we have and how its used, and its resource base. Right now bitcoin mining has an energy footprint approximately equal to the whole country of Ireland's. Resources like copper are peaking, and rare earths are, well, rare. The ecosystem, however, could be supporting 7 billion human brains without hunger if we got our act together. Evolution may have not fixed all the kludges, as our jellyfish-speed nervous system with its loopy optic nerve will attest, but it has done a fantastic job of optimizing the existing species for available resources. We're already experimenting with DNA for computation. We're poking around with an awful lot of 2.2 volt binary 0's and 5 volt 1's to simulate what those proteins can do - and those proteins do it in the wild, without melting silicon.
This means that biomimicry has a lot to say about a singularity. To scale with resilience in the coming decades to the level of a singularity, will not computing need to look and behave more and more like life - first?
If you agree that computing is headed in this direction, and recall that you're reading this on an internet currently teetering on becoming a wholesale panopticon of the state, do you feel that life needs a singularity as much as a singularity needs life?
HURD versus Linux is pretty clear; HURD's a microkernel and Linux is not. What makes HURD interesting compared to Genode's L4 kernel? At a glance, they seem to be doing more similar things.
Pluto is too small for the heat to be internally generated, and there is no massive nearby body to cause tidal forces and the like.
Wait. Charon is massive enough and close enough to Pluto that the barycenter is in space, between it and Pluto. Also, Pluto's orbit is quite elliptical. Doesn't that seem sufficient to generate some extra tidal energy?
The number one cause of flooding in China is, and has been for a long time, that the ability of the watershed to retain water and let it move through slowly has been degraded by some of the longest-term use of the plow on the face of the planet. The Loess Plateau, the original homeland of the Han people, shows some of the most horrific erosion ever. It's been reduced to near-desert conditions, and rainwater washes off from it unabsorbed, carrying silt, right into the river that's called Yellow because of just that.
The more means of abstraction to the service required, the more you're handing things to the middlemen. We don't want to cut checks to let everyone buy without price controls, otherwise the market will respond as if everyone's richer and just price accordingly. If you do price controls, that's extra regulation and besides the point.
What ought to be happening is a new homestead act; there are far more foreclosed buildings held by crooked banks than homeless people. Seems to me they should be dissolved, and the homes doled out - people who don't have to scramble for survival will be able to do far more productive things with their time.
Landlord profits are a lousy thing to optimise for. They're not in it to have the most energy efficient, well-made, forward-thinking homes. They're not in it to sell just enough. They're going for maximum profit. Doesn't our civilization have better things to do than let people who own far more than they personally need control things?
No matter how bad the things the NSA and its lackies do inside the national borders, the worse stuff happens elsewhere.
How do you think they keep their hands clean? Egypt and even Syria have been client states for rendering prisoners for torture methods the CIA didn't stoop to. Raw recorded phone conversations between US citizens have been handed over to Mossad. They use different governments and nations as shells in their game, and ultimately, place on the hierarchy of power and fear, from bottom to top, is much more relevant to how people are acting than any border.
This is not the kind of power we should be okay with, when they've tortured people in Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram - and wow, now they have a black site in Chicago????
You can't have a vicious beast headquartered in DC and expect it to only eat out! We're the midnight snack, here. The tricks they've gotten away with overseas with the people they've goaded the American public to hate and blame, they'll turn on that same public.
Justice for the Other person isn't just a matter of high humanity, it's a matter of our own long-term freedom. That's why I have never opposed war from a place of not supporting troops, or loving my country and world less than a whole lot. In real life, karma comes whether deserved or not - it goes around, it comes around, and who knows who it'll roll over on the way. Because of the violence we got co-opted to with a pack of lies, we're just shuffled to a later spot on the line to goodness knows what. My heart's broken for the state of humanity when the 5% of it that's the USA is both oppressed and used to oppress.
And I have never felt content to just play a game. Games always fall short in some way. I found it rewarding to try and splice out code for unnecessary features when they wouldn't run in 128K on our home PC in the 80's, I thought I'd struck gold when I found out Chuck Yeager's AFT stored its planes in flat text and simple experimentation could reveal what the numbers were, and before I was coding Nethack and MUDs, I was hex-editing X-Wing. That was way more interesting than any game alone, though the adults in my life thought I was "just playing games".
Yeah, well, I didn't listen to them, and that's why I'm not mowing lawns to get by.
Heh. Nice straw man. No, I buy strictly local-independent, never chain. The grounds get composted and go into my garden. The little extra paid for the coffee beans is made up for the lack of unnecessary corporate goods elsewhere. The point isn't hipster pretentiousness, it's to point out that good stuff doesn't come from black boxes, and it's ridiculously simple to be hands on.
This is horrible. Keurig coffee is crap, and it creates a huge amount of disposable waste.
Me, I have a small water boiler to get the water up to 208 degrees F, two grinders - a hand-turned grinder and an electric one for when I'm in a hurry and the noise isn't a problem, and a french press. I keep the coffee beans whole in a brown paper bag. Just grind, pour in a way that doesn't leave grounds floating above the water, and I can take the french press back to my desk and pour into a large mug in five minutes.
It's still simpler than a PBJ and I don't create a huge pile of plastic garbage. Jeez, will someone get the marketing departments some psychotherapy already?
"An awkward, feeble, leaky lie is a thing which you ought to make it your unceasing study to avoid; such a lie as that has no more real permanence than an average truth. Why, you might as well tell the truth at once and be done with it. A feeble, stupid, preposterous lie will not live two years -- except it be a slander upon somebody. It is indestructible, then of course, but that is no merit of yours."
"And here's where he lives..." (some sort of bang) "And here's his neighbor..." (bang again) "And here's his neighbor's summer home..." (bang and some thumps) "And here's the town by the beach - tropical island - the whole planet he lived on!"
The bangs became curiously long and bass-level, and the voice broke off into maniacal cackling.
Every time this comes up, either a fast-breeder or a thorium crackpot comes out of their holes.
What if we just stop wasting resources?
Take transport: why does it take > 30 kW to move around one ~80kg bag of flesh&bones? Because it's too cheap. Why don't we insulate homes more? Because the alternative is too cheap. Ad nauseam.
Sometimes the appropriate technology is advanced, sometimes moving a pile of dirt into the right place does the job. Here's an example: http://www.earthbagbuilding.co...
Yes, you can retrofit many existing homes to this standard. You can even use sandbag-laying equipment for this purpose. What's in the way are regulations built to suit developers and homeowner's associations built around building and flipping energy-guzzling disposable McMansions - for starters.
The latest methods for building these homes resemble 3D printing and they only need a fraction of the solar panels a regular home does to be completely off-grid. Add rainwater harvesting and composting, and you just cut out the need for energy-guzzling waterworks. Add gardens and greenhouses, and replacing the first 50% of your food consumption from carbon-intensive sources is easy. Moreover, very little portland cement - itself alone responsible for 11% of humanity's CO2 emissions - is needed for this.
The gadget-oriented can still go to town automating the opening and closing of shutters and convective cooling to complete this completely self-sufficient home that could supply most of its occupant's food. Building one of these is a survivalist coup. Building a lot of these is a strategy to turn this crisis around without even touching a nuclear reactor.
I just want to highlight that we can easily bring our consumption down to a level that we can easily scale renewables up to 100% for.
Do you realize that carbon dioxide uptake from the atmosphere is what's driving ocean acidification? Compare the map of the world's forests to one hundred, one thousand, and ten thousand years ago. Add the fact that industrialization over the past two centuries got hundreds of millions of years' worth of sequestered carbon and released it into the atmosphere. What's this to the natural world? A top-level mass extinction.
The ecosystem's screwed. Whether it's beyond recovery is the question. Seeing as how humans come from an ecosystem, not a factory, we've got to be doing more about this than we are.
Any civilisation that in 5000 years never managed to invent the fork and carried on using 2 sticks to eat with isn't that great.
Really? You're sure that they just couldn't figure a fork out?
Here's the story of chopsticks. Having potential weapons at the dinner table became a real problem in times of tension, and it became a violent, rude spectacle to stab or slice your food at dinner with others - think state functions or otherwise. It implies what you might be thinking to do to others present. Hence, leave the knives in the kitchen with the cooks. Hence, you don't use those stabby forks. Spoons and chopsticks become the social acceptable ways to eat.
Not that everyone learns from the past however old their civilization is, but China's cultural roots are extremely sensible. Save your slurs for the stupid officials who are acting authoritarian in childish ways. They're not good examples of any culture.
Since we actually have a widely accepted portable assembly language now, I have been pondering this very question. LLVM assembly holds a lot of potential, similar to how the TAOS operating system promised back in the early 90's with its virtual processor assembly: https://sites.google.com/site/...
The guy who inspired me to want to program used to write assembly on a 386 with a slightly hacked copy of the 8086-oriented freeware assembler CHASM. He read compiled binaries in hex like code. I asked him, "Doesn't it take a lot more time to write in assembler?" "Not that much", he replied, "You break things down into functions and build libraries of code you don't have to reinvent, just like in C." The guy was freaking brilliant.
We've so frequently created new languages around new ideas in programming, and that's great, but eventually the number of abstractions becomes quite an issue. People are willing to write operating systems like MenuetOS in assembly in x86_64 asm. That's great. I'd love to see a compiler there to do validation of code, uphold Ada-like programming by contract, that sort of thing, but I'd love to see assembly programming make a comeback.
About those C++ templates, you said, "unless you stick to a very restrictive subset of C++ that's almost C, then you'll end up generating too much code (C++ templates are not just a good way of blowing away your i-cache on high-end systems, they're also a good way of blowing away your total code storage on embedded chips)."
I used to use the -fno-implicit-templates parameter on g++: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs... when I was doing C++ heavily. I also usually didn't have more than two templated types, mostly to keep the debugging simpler. Do you still have any quantification for the overhead with C++ code generation versus C's as you used it? Did you try options like this? And how heavily templated was the code?
Talk about a skewed, worthless study from Brookings. Garbage in, garbage out.
As Amory Lovins ably pointed out, its data is old. It also does not consider the entire cost of production, usage and cleanup. Cleanup costs count too! Are West Virginia, Ohio, British Columbia, Alberta, the Niger River basin, or Ecuador's rainforests, or the Gulf of Mexico just not in Charles Frank's back yard? I guess not. Screw people for living there, then. Do not the geopolitical considerations of an aggressive military foreign policy required to keep the oil flowing not count too? Screw those GIs and the people who live where they're sent in oil wars, too. Exxon's got to make a buck.
That's what externalization is. It means omitting key and pertinent parts of the picture and just sticking it to whomever is dealing with the consequences.
Solar panels are rapidly getting more efficient and cheaper to make, and you can put them directly on site where they're needed so you don't have to lose electricity to resistance across a far-flung grid with its necessary redundancies and overproduction, which are required in the event that a powerstation needs a maintenance cycle.
Joe. For Python, C++, bash, and in days of wretched drudgery for which Larry Wall will surely answer for one day, Perl.
Ever since the days of Slackware CDs and the Linux 0.98 kernel, I have happily used joe, a Wordstar-like editor with features and size comparable to vim. It's carried me through maintaining 80,000 line C++ codebases and I do my Python work in it quite happily. There are plenty of macro and regex capabilities, block text marking, everything I need without the weight of an IDE.
There hasn't been a single vi or emacs proponent that could do anything in their editor of choice that I couldn't do, and probably quicker. It goes like this: "But it's installed by default on Solaris!" I get my editor with a quick compile, and I know enough vi and nano to get there. It's super fast to install it on any modern Linux distro. "But it'll work when the terminal settings break!" Not a reason to select an editor for heavy coding. "But you have to make sure you have got properly formatted EOL characters and manage your spaces!" I do it just as well as they do; we're not talking about Windows Notepad here. "But more people use it!" Pike off, imaginary objectors.
If it works and meets spec, you use the tools you get the best results in.
Slashdot Mirror
What's really important for us to realize is that we're a favored group of the working people, but we are not immune to how the current system treats workers, and we need to look at our impact on others.
We haven't taken this recession quite so much on the chin as blue-collar workers; jobs may be on the rise again, but not well-paying jobs for most. In the meantime, those landlords who are charging high rents in tech-heavy cities? They're making life hard for us, but nigh well impossible to other people. That gentrification is displacing people of less means, often people with roots and community. Watching the Mission in San Francisco become a place that the Latino culture that gave it its character could scarcely hang on made me really think about this. I had occasion to have a bunch of housemates who worked in the restaurants, and they were barely hanging on financially, a non-stop cliffhanger. Seems to me we're enabling a racket.
I for my part have chosen to build a tiny house, get a mobile hotspot, telecommute, and work on scaling my lifestyle to my actual needs. Landlords don't usually offer that; they're trying to oversell as much as anyone, and to as generic an audience as possible. We could work on changing that. I see people turning to community land trusts to try to keep housing possible for low-income people. It's hard for artists that make San Francisco to remain there without such measures, at this point. If we in IT gave this our energy too, we'd be keeping more of what we toil so many hours for, but it'd give momentum to something that's a lifeline to others. I'd rather not just work long hours to give the landlords incentive to evict the artists that made me want to live somewhere to begin with!
In short, we're in the business of being problem solvers at work; if we do this for ourselves and the communities we're in or neighbors too, it could change a lot of this.
And here I bought these vintage-incandescent LED bulbs with warm glowy yellow "filaments" for nothing. They were right on the shelf and everything, and I didn't even read a cool headline about 'em. What a rip-off! ;)
I've been running Linux for nearly all of the last four years, and a majority of my computing hours since 1998, and this stuff's why. I won't let it touch baremetal anymore. Microsoft will download 6GB behind my back? I run on a connection with a 20GB monthly cap! That is completely unacceptable. I wonder when customers are going to cease handing control of their systems to something that's going to do MS marketing's bidding behind their back.
Currently there are clear incompatibilities between the computing power that we have and how its used, and its resource base. Right now bitcoin mining has an energy footprint approximately equal to the whole country of Ireland's. Resources like copper are peaking, and rare earths are, well, rare. The ecosystem, however, could be supporting 7 billion human brains without hunger if we got our act together. Evolution may have not fixed all the kludges, as our jellyfish-speed nervous system with its loopy optic nerve will attest, but it has done a fantastic job of optimizing the existing species for available resources. We're already experimenting with DNA for computation. We're poking around with an awful lot of 2.2 volt binary 0's and 5 volt 1's to simulate what those proteins can do - and those proteins do it in the wild, without melting silicon.
This means that biomimicry has a lot to say about a singularity. To scale with resilience in the coming decades to the level of a singularity, will not computing need to look and behave more and more like life - first?
If you agree that computing is headed in this direction, and recall that you're reading this on an internet currently teetering on becoming a wholesale panopticon of the state, do you feel that life needs a singularity as much as a singularity needs life?
HURD versus Linux is pretty clear; HURD's a microkernel and Linux is not. What makes HURD interesting compared to Genode's L4 kernel? At a glance, they seem to be doing more similar things.
Pluto is too small for the heat to be internally generated, and there is no massive nearby body to cause tidal forces and the like.
Wait. Charon is massive enough and close enough to Pluto that the barycenter is in space, between it and Pluto. Also, Pluto's orbit is quite elliptical. Doesn't that seem sufficient to generate some extra tidal energy?
"the ability of the watershed to retain water and let it move through slowly. [The land] has been degraded by "
Darn touchpads.
The number one cause of flooding in China is, and has been for a long time, that the ability of the watershed to retain water and let it move through slowly has been degraded by some of the longest-term use of the plow on the face of the planet. The Loess Plateau, the original homeland of the Han people, shows some of the most horrific erosion ever. It's been reduced to near-desert conditions, and rainwater washes off from it unabsorbed, carrying silt, right into the river that's called Yellow because of just that.
Air pollution just adds to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The more means of abstraction to the service required, the more you're handing things to the middlemen. We don't want to cut checks to let everyone buy without price controls, otherwise the market will respond as if everyone's richer and just price accordingly. If you do price controls, that's extra regulation and besides the point.
What ought to be happening is a new homestead act; there are far more foreclosed buildings held by crooked banks than homeless people. Seems to me they should be dissolved, and the homes doled out - people who don't have to scramble for survival will be able to do far more productive things with their time.
Landlord profits are a lousy thing to optimise for. They're not in it to have the most energy efficient, well-made, forward-thinking homes. They're not in it to sell just enough. They're going for maximum profit. Doesn't our civilization have better things to do than let people who own far more than they personally need control things?
No matter how bad the things the NSA and its lackies do inside the national borders, the worse stuff happens elsewhere.
How do you think they keep their hands clean? Egypt and even Syria have been client states for rendering prisoners for torture methods the CIA didn't stoop to. Raw recorded phone conversations between US citizens have been handed over to Mossad. They use different governments and nations as shells in their game, and ultimately, place on the hierarchy of power and fear, from bottom to top, is much more relevant to how people are acting than any border.
This is not the kind of power we should be okay with, when they've tortured people in Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram - and wow, now they have a black site in Chicago????
You can't have a vicious beast headquartered in DC and expect it to only eat out! We're the midnight snack, here. The tricks they've gotten away with overseas with the people they've goaded the American public to hate and blame, they'll turn on that same public.
Justice for the Other person isn't just a matter of high humanity, it's a matter of our own long-term freedom. That's why I have never opposed war from a place of not supporting troops, or loving my country and world less than a whole lot. In real life, karma comes whether deserved or not - it goes around, it comes around, and who knows who it'll roll over on the way. Because of the violence we got co-opted to with a pack of lies, we're just shuffled to a later spot on the line to goodness knows what. My heart's broken for the state of humanity when the 5% of it that's the USA is both oppressed and used to oppress.
And I have never felt content to just play a game. Games always fall short in some way. I found it rewarding to try and splice out code for unnecessary features when they wouldn't run in 128K on our home PC in the 80's, I thought I'd struck gold when I found out Chuck Yeager's AFT stored its planes in flat text and simple experimentation could reveal what the numbers were, and before I was coding Nethack and MUDs, I was hex-editing X-Wing. That was way more interesting than any game alone, though the adults in my life thought I was "just playing games".
Yeah, well, I didn't listen to them, and that's why I'm not mowing lawns to get by.
Heh. Nice straw man. No, I buy strictly local-independent, never chain. The grounds get composted and go into my garden. The little extra paid for the coffee beans is made up for the lack of unnecessary corporate goods elsewhere. The point isn't hipster pretentiousness, it's to point out that good stuff doesn't come from black boxes, and it's ridiculously simple to be hands on.
This is horrible. Keurig coffee is crap, and it creates a huge amount of disposable waste.
Me, I have a small water boiler to get the water up to 208 degrees F, two grinders - a hand-turned grinder and an electric one for when I'm in a hurry and the noise isn't a problem, and a french press. I keep the coffee beans whole in a brown paper bag. Just grind, pour in a way that doesn't leave grounds floating above the water, and I can take the french press back to my desk and pour into a large mug in five minutes.
It's still simpler than a PBJ and I don't create a huge pile of plastic garbage. Jeez, will someone get the marketing departments some psychotherapy already?
Tidal friction seems like a major factor for heating Pluto. The system has its barycenter between Pluto's surface and Charon!
Careful with this headline. You never know who might be watching. Like, Peter Jackson.
"An awkward, feeble, leaky lie is a thing which you ought to make it your unceasing study to avoid; such a lie as that has no more real permanence than an average truth. Why, you might as well tell the truth at once and be done with it. A feeble, stupid, preposterous lie will not live two years -- except it be a slander upon somebody. It is indestructible, then of course, but that is no merit of yours."
- Mark Twain, "Advice to Youth"
A British voice was heard saying...
"And here's where he lives..." (some sort of bang)
"And here's his neighbor..." (bang again)
"And here's his neighbor's summer home..." (bang and some thumps)
"And here's the town by the beach - tropical island - the whole planet he lived on!"
The bangs became curiously long and bass-level, and the voice broke off into maniacal cackling.
...But what I really want is a Star Trek spin on the "space potato" video.
Tell me you don't.
Every time this comes up, either a fast-breeder or a thorium crackpot comes out of their holes.
What if we just stop wasting resources?
Take transport: why does it take > 30 kW to move around one ~80kg bag of flesh&bones? Because it's too cheap. Why don't we insulate homes more? Because the alternative is too cheap. Ad nauseam.
Sometimes the appropriate technology is advanced, sometimes moving a pile of dirt into the right place does the job. Here's an example: http://www.earthbagbuilding.co...
Yes, you can retrofit many existing homes to this standard. You can even use sandbag-laying equipment for this purpose. What's in the way are regulations built to suit developers and homeowner's associations built around building and flipping energy-guzzling disposable McMansions - for starters.
The latest methods for building these homes resemble 3D printing and they only need a fraction of the solar panels a regular home does to be completely off-grid. Add rainwater harvesting and composting, and you just cut out the need for energy-guzzling waterworks. Add gardens and greenhouses, and replacing the first 50% of your food consumption from carbon-intensive sources is easy. Moreover, very little portland cement - itself alone responsible for 11% of humanity's CO2 emissions - is needed for this.
The gadget-oriented can still go to town automating the opening and closing of shutters and convective cooling to complete this completely self-sufficient home that could supply most of its occupant's food. Building one of these is a survivalist coup. Building a lot of these is a strategy to turn this crisis around without even touching a nuclear reactor.
I just want to highlight that we can easily bring our consumption down to a level that we can easily scale renewables up to 100% for.
Do you realize that carbon dioxide uptake from the atmosphere is what's driving ocean acidification? Compare the map of the world's forests to one hundred, one thousand, and ten thousand years ago. Add the fact that industrialization over the past two centuries got hundreds of millions of years' worth of sequestered carbon and released it into the atmosphere. What's this to the natural world? A top-level mass extinction.
The ecosystem's screwed. Whether it's beyond recovery is the question. Seeing as how humans come from an ecosystem, not a factory, we've got to be doing more about this than we are.
Any civilisation that in 5000 years never managed to invent the fork and carried on using 2 sticks to eat with isn't that great.
Really? You're sure that they just couldn't figure a fork out?
Here's the story of chopsticks. Having potential weapons at the dinner table became a real problem in times of tension, and it became a violent, rude spectacle to stab or slice your food at dinner with others - think state functions or otherwise. It implies what you might be thinking to do to others present. Hence, leave the knives in the kitchen with the cooks. Hence, you don't use those stabby forks. Spoons and chopsticks become the social acceptable ways to eat.
Not that everyone learns from the past however old their civilization is, but China's cultural roots are extremely sensible. Save your slurs for the stupid officials who are acting authoritarian in childish ways. They're not good examples of any culture.
Since we actually have a widely accepted portable assembly language now, I have been pondering this very question. LLVM assembly holds a lot of potential, similar to how the TAOS operating system promised back in the early 90's with its virtual processor assembly: https://sites.google.com/site/...
The guy who inspired me to want to program used to write assembly on a 386 with a slightly hacked copy of the 8086-oriented freeware assembler CHASM. He read compiled binaries in hex like code. I asked him, "Doesn't it take a lot more time to write in assembler?" "Not that much", he replied, "You break things down into functions and build libraries of code you don't have to reinvent, just like in C." The guy was freaking brilliant.
We've so frequently created new languages around new ideas in programming, and that's great, but eventually the number of abstractions becomes quite an issue. People are willing to write operating systems like MenuetOS in assembly in x86_64 asm. That's great. I'd love to see a compiler there to do validation of code, uphold Ada-like programming by contract, that sort of thing, but I'd love to see assembly programming make a comeback.
About those C++ templates, you said, "unless you stick to a very restrictive subset of C++ that's almost C, then you'll end up generating too much code (C++ templates are not just a good way of blowing away your i-cache on high-end systems, they're also a good way of blowing away your total code storage on embedded chips)."
I used to use the -fno-implicit-templates parameter on g++: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs... when I was doing C++ heavily. I also usually didn't have more than two templated types, mostly to keep the debugging simpler. Do you still have any quantification for the overhead with C++ code generation versus C's as you used it? Did you try options like this? And how heavily templated was the code?
Talk about a skewed, worthless study from Brookings. Garbage in, garbage out.
As Amory Lovins ably pointed out, its data is old. It also does not consider the entire cost of production, usage and cleanup. Cleanup costs count too! Are West Virginia, Ohio, British Columbia, Alberta, the Niger River basin, or Ecuador's rainforests, or the Gulf of Mexico just not in Charles Frank's back yard? I guess not. Screw people for living there, then. Do not the geopolitical considerations of an aggressive military foreign policy required to keep the oil flowing not count too? Screw those GIs and the people who live where they're sent in oil wars, too. Exxon's got to make a buck.
That's what externalization is. It means omitting key and pertinent parts of the picture and just sticking it to whomever is dealing with the consequences.
Solar panels are rapidly getting more efficient and cheaper to make, and you can put them directly on site where they're needed so you don't have to lose electricity to resistance across a far-flung grid with its necessary redundancies and overproduction, which are required in the event that a powerstation needs a maintenance cycle.
Someone's just keen to keep a bloody monopoly.
Joe. For Python, C++, bash, and in days of wretched drudgery for which Larry Wall will surely answer for one day, Perl.
Ever since the days of Slackware CDs and the Linux 0.98 kernel, I have happily used joe, a Wordstar-like editor with features and size comparable to vim. It's carried me through maintaining 80,000 line C++ codebases and I do my Python work in it quite happily. There are plenty of macro and regex capabilities, block text marking, everything I need without the weight of an IDE.
There hasn't been a single vi or emacs proponent that could do anything in their editor of choice that I couldn't do, and probably quicker. It goes like this: "But it's installed by default on Solaris!" I get my editor with a quick compile, and I know enough vi and nano to get there. It's super fast to install it on any modern Linux distro. "But it'll work when the terminal settings break!" Not a reason to select an editor for heavy coding. "But you have to make sure you have got properly formatted EOL characters and manage your spaces!" I do it just as well as they do; we're not talking about Windows Notepad here. "But more people use it!" Pike off, imaginary objectors.
If it works and meets spec, you use the tools you get the best results in.