With this late rise of artificial stupidity, it becomes harder and harder to find/anything/ online.
google is less and less a global grep and more and more of an expert system -- double guessing (always wrong) what I'm really after based on shitty models and trends.
Someone asked me not long ago some detail about some limits in well-known piece of software; All online searches were giving just crap blog posts and other garbage; not a single source code or doc hits; in desperation, I git cloned the source, did a couple of greps and had all wrapped up in 5 minutes. After this, I wrote an answer on a Q/A -- now my crappy answer is the 1st search result everywhere, and no still no reference to primary sources, despite them being prominently linked from my answer.
Why have we to suffer this horror in the first place?
I remember reading a memo by some Microsoft engineer from some 20 years ago who was porting Internet Explorer to Unix; he noticed there that the Unix folk are easily put off by modal dialog boxes and prefer to have be able to open another window or page while a dialog box is active.
Is that no longer the case?
What happened since then? Why do we have to suffer the horror of gnome, which is making its dialog boxes global at display level, and nothing short of a reboot or ssh-ing in from another machine is able to save you from some misbehaving gnome crap?
Haven't browsers had variable fonts since the introduction of CSS?
No, and they still haven't. What they call variable fonts is just a packaging hack -- more than one typeface in the same file.
What I expected was the implementation of an algorithm that will stretch the letters instead of "justifying" (filling up with spaces). That was done in western typography since Gutenberg.
Something like kashida in Arabic, but less dramatic. I know that this kind of microtypography was supported in LaTeX since at least a decade. Is stuff like this supported in CSS? Will it ever be?
That error message should be "Can't assign to a language keyword, you %&#@£!!!"
For that to work, the parser should backtrack and reparse the expression treating 'else' as a terminal / variable name. That would be an absurd complication, and will hide the fact that keywords aren't symbols. (That's not scheme, where you could bind 'if' and 'for' to whatever you like).
Of course, they could be less anal and write something like 'unexpected keyword "else"', but the parser was probably written in an afternoon 10 years ago and not touched since then.
Generally speaking, NO ONE of the many new languages I have seen in decades give a thing about precise error reporting and human-meaningful explanation of the wrongdoing.
Try perl, since its parser was 'cleaned up' some years ago. If you forget a quote or a closing '}' you get a hundred pages of error messages (with thousands of "variable may not stay shared" and "Scalar found where operator expected"), with the one mentioning the error line neither at the start or at the end, but hidden somewhere in the middle (if it exists at all!)
No shit. There is a thing called 'caching' -- they would cache the tiles rendered in the most used projections. And it would make no difference to their energy bill -- It's not like everybody is going to use his special projection just to spite google.
You're already able to load your own kml tracks & features with the google maps api -- which works by you giving google some publicly accessible url, and they fetching it and on-demand rendering the vector data into semi-transparent tiles just for you.
And besides, libraries like OpenLayers are able to reproject tiles on the client-side. And most maps data is vector-like (places, roads, countours) which is much better (and faster!) if served raw and rendered by the client.
So flat earthers could go on living their fantasy and have a high tech map to show their earthly vision.
That's an idiotic thing to say.
By definition, any map projection is a mathematical transformation from an ELLIPSOID to a plane.
The problem with google maps is they don't use an actual projection, but a hack which assumes that the earth is a perfect SPHERE, which is just as pretentiously ignorant as assuming the earth is flat, only less funny.
That kludge was invented in order to simplify the javascript in the pre-canvas/pre-html5/pre-webgl era, it has no redeeming properties beyond that, in spite of its continuing use in most web map applications.
With bigger and bigger Unicode character sets, every font will not only have emojis, and various human languages
That's not how it works. You use different fonts for different scripts -- no need for eg. a cyrillic font to support hebrew. That's how every program that displays text (browsers, editors) works.
As to emoji and other "non-traditional" characters in a terminal emulator, you could either give up on monospace fonts & cursor-addressability (ie act as a dumb terminal), or display some replacement characters (and show the real widgets when the user hovers the mouse over them). The unicode consortium has long abandoned any pretension to sanity so now we have "woman + school => female teacher" and skin color character modifiers.
it could also eventually have a set of font glyphs for every possible 8x8 cell grid. (That's only 2^64 characters extra in each font!) Then you could use these font characters to display text and graphics like it is 1980 again!
I don't know about you, but my fonts were 8x16, not 8x8 grids. And you were able to change the character slots dynamically, no need of huge character tables. That's how that cute arrow cursor was working in FreeBSD's VGA console.
Hell the god awful "word processor" rom on my early 80s micro was more user friendly than vi.
Just like notepad or nano, it was a vi that was always in input mode. A half or quart vi.
It's very easy to get vi more "user friendly". For instance
:map! ^[[A ^[ka :map! ^[[B ^[ja
will make up/down arrows work without switching mode. (press control-V, esc to enter ^[)
The difference between vi and eg. notepad is "philosophical"; just like the difference between manual and automatic transmission in cars -- anybody who has learned to drive with the former won't find the latter more "user-friendly" at all, but just stupid and annoying.
I much prefer nvi over vim, not the least due to file locking
Then please make noise, maybe someone will finally deign to include some badly needed bug fixes in the upcoming Debian release, especially one related to locking, as well as getting rid of an embarassing security hole someone managed to introduce by blindly messing around with the recovery scripts.
I have a lot of other bug fixes, especially related to multibyte support, but judging by the reactions, it seems that I'm the only nvi user left on Debian; there's hope, however: someone found it worth his time to make the building of the nvi package dependent on systemd;-)
Sudo actually has some good reasons for existing, nost notably, auditibility. If someone SSHes into a box as root, all you know is that someone logged in as root.
That's not true. You also know WHOSE KEY was used to log in, and where from. That info is logged by default to/var/log/auth.
But sudo really has a unique feature -- the insults it prints when a bad password was entered. To replicate that, you really need custom mods or whatever.
As to shitty developers & such, I'll notice that the setuid mechanism is not one of the most intuitive or robust features of unix; there are very few people who really understand the split personality and dance between the real, effective and saved-set-uid, and many were badly bitten when writing "safe" code in setuid programs.
What is not mentioned in the summary is that the bug only shows up when using sudo.
Sudo is a nightmare, both technically and psychologically (strangely, it's seems easier to run 'sudo npm' or 'sudo fuck_me' than running the same commands when logged in as root).
It makes me laugh any time when I try to build some shitty program (inside a vm, of course), and more often than not, it tries to run 'sudo' from the install rule and trash over my system by writing and overwriting files inside/usr and/etc, and ignoring any PREFIX option, despite that convention being almost 40 years old.
I really don't understand the appeal of 'sudo' -- what's the problem with ssh root@localhost with public key authentication?
I wish they would flag bot-written pages accordingly, so I could filter them out in searches without having to fetch them first.
I've tried to build an interface where a flag is drawn on a map whereever there's a wikipedia article geolocated there (no matter what language it's in).
Either with the old wikimedia query interface or SPARQL, there's no way to get rid of the flurry of bot written pages, which are simply the same ridiculously innacurate geonames data, formatted into an article just to bump up the number of non-stub pages, or to prove something (what? that some jerk is able to write a crap-flooding script? great!)
Consider this. Worthless garbage -- complete with made-up meteo data and a dozen of references. They have no article about the great inventor but have one about a small mountain in the opposite corner of the earth (that I'm probably the only guy that had the curiosity to climb in this decade).
Of course, I could just filter the worst offenders (eg. the cebuano and southern min wikipedia), but this garbage has started to infect other wikipedias too (eg. the swedish one).
But in most cases little of value is lost. If it wasn't important enough for people to learn, odds are good it wasn't important in general.
That is the "best of all possible worlds" fallacy. In other words, for someone living in a cage or a basement, learning to swim or ride a bicycle is not "important" enough.
Excellent point. Speaking a different language makes it just a bit easier to engage in pointless tribalism and we really don't need more of that.
Tribalism has nothing to do with language or culture.
Rwanda is probably the only country in Africa where everybody speaks the same language and dialect, and has the same culture. That didn't prevent the most horrible genocide from happening just there.
The same with Bosnia in Europe.
The fact that Unionists and Republicans in Ulster speak the same language didn't bring them together; the level of distrust and segregation is ridiculous and mind-boggling, even for a third-worlder like me.
Most Catalans, Ukrainians, Irish, etc aren't really speaking their languages in everyday life anymore (despite being forced to learn them in school); and that rather exarcerbated nationalism instead of preventing it.
Most French of "foreign descent" that are populating the depressed "banlieues" are not able to speak any other language than French (and neither were their parents). But that doesn't mean they're accepted as full-fledged citizens; they're still 'Arabs' for all intents and purposes.
That "I am not a robot" shit doesn't work for me either. Not a single time.
I supposed they've only tested it on windows and macs, or only with click-to-focus window managers on linux, or whatever other pretentious inadequacy I came to expect from google. And robots are probably bypassing it just fine.
I haven't studied the subject in any depth, but the thing about how they're able to profile the "tiny movements" of the pointer movement is utter bullshit -- the GUI is already processing the raw pointer data after taking into account mouse acceleration settings, the frequency of the timer interrupt, etc. It doesn't leave much human "noise" in there. Did they release any honest stats about the error rate of that stupid toy?
Best example is when systemd decided to hijack kernel's command line
How could it do that? Has systemd taken over grub/lilo too?
I never used systemd, but I know that the linux *kernel* is passing the command line params to the init program, whatever that is. Go read about it here.
systemd doesn't have to hijack anything in order to complain about params it doesn't understand. Maybe it's just giving itself airs about legit kernel params it considers "illegal"? (the way the stupid bash programmable completion won't let me complete file names to some programs it thinks it knows everything about).
The value of the computation is that it's what secures the immutability of the ledger.
Well, I was able to timestamp things by discreetly embedding their sha hash in the e-mail headers of messages I was posting to different mailing lists. That was not the purpose of the messages, I would've sent them anyway, as part of patch sets and discussion threads. Then they were replicated through dozens of mailing lists archives and hundreds of subscribers -- again, completely oblivious to my abuse of their infrastructure as an "immutable ledger".
This is of course, quite rudimentary and naive, but there are ways to implement an unassailable ledger by piggy-backing on naturally distributed things (peer-to-peer distribution protocols, instagram selfies, etc). An attacker would have then to take over the entire internet, not just over an army of cretinous dorks running their GPUs in cycles. And that would be "free" in terms of resources wasted just to secure the ledger -- a lot of resources are already spent to sent boiler plate & repetitive xml fluff back & forth; that could be put to some good use.
I've even hacked qemu so that a usb device could appear inside the vm with a different vendor or product id than the real one (I don't know if they implemented such a feature in qemu or in the usb subsystem of the linux kernel since then).
Qemu has also the advantage that it lets you extend the evaluation period of any software indefinitely, by faking the time inside the vm using its "-rtc base=etc" option and using the -snapshot feature to discard any permanent changes.
Duff's device. Always my favorite for explaining how broken C was.
What's so broken about it?
If you consider select() just syntax sugar for a jump table, it makes perfect sense for its case label to have the same syntax constraints as goto labels. Why should they respect the underlying block structure? It makes perfect sense that they do not, and it's easy to understand for anyone (unless they insist on considering select() a fancy way of writing an "if()... else if()... else if()... else" chain, which it's not).
Maybe allowing any semblance of goto / unstructured code is dangerous in the first place, but that's a completely different argument -- but something's not "broken" if it's working as intended.
Another C "bug" that they took great pains to quash in all C-derived languages is the ability of writing a comma expression inside of an "?:" conditional -- despite "," having lower precedence than "?" or ":" (eg "a = p ? q++, r++ : s"). That was equally dumb -- if such terse syntax as "?:" sucks, then they should've get rid of it completely; forcing people to add another pair of parentheses to their gibberish salad isn't doing anyone any favors.
A later OS design called Inferno used a virtual machine model with yet another C-inspired programming language directly supporting the CSP model - Limbo. Limbo also supported GC, one of the reasons Alef (which didn't) was ultimately replaced by C.
But it was inferno's vm which supported GC and CSP natively. Of course, if you go through the trouble of building a Lisp machine, you better use Lisp than C to program it.
This is different from go; go programs are executables which run on platforms which do not offer GC services at hardware or system level.
You're like someone touting namespaces, shared envvars between processes, etc as features of the rc shell language instead of features of the plan9 system as a whole -- an rc port which simulates those features in userland would be a stupid toy.
So a language with GC and direct CSP support was known to work and be a good design for a number of tasks. If it wasn't it would have been dropped earlier.
Which is exactly what they did! adding GC to alef was not a winning proposition, so they did the smart thing and rewrote rio, acme, etc in C.
Unfortunately for us, they didn't give up on the idea.
What success Go has had is almost entirely due to Google marketing.
Do not underestimate the snobbery factor. Go is supposedly designed[1] by a bunch a unix/plan9 luminaries, and that alone makes a lot of wannabe high-flying programmers fret in their pants.
[1] based on its underwhelming its design is, the actual work was probably done by some less talented imitators, and Ken Thompson &co just gave it a stamp of approval after fixing some long held pet peeves with C and C-like languages.
The source code isn't worth much if you can't use it to rebuild and install the whole system.
For most android phones and wireless routers the "gpl source code" usually consist of some old / incomplete tarred archive of the linux source code which does NOT correspond to the kernel installed on the device; for many drivers, the source files are a mix of magic numbers and binary arrays; and no change logs or version history are ever provided.
The fact that they're able to pull this shit without anybody crying foul, and making the "source code" available acts like a magical gesture that shies tilfoil-hatters away is rather an indictment of the GPL.
When presented with some nasty, convoluted problem (eg. normalize the data from badly scanned documents and identify errors), you can be a "Real Programmer" and get nothing done after months of posturing, or you can be a lazy ass and throw some stupid perl script in half an hour (including debugging) that gets everything in and allows you to concentrate on stuff that is more intellectually rewarding
That's why Perl is so hated by the "Real Programmers" -- because it devalues their stature and trade.
Besides, not all code has to be so much readable. I have perl scripts that I wrote 10 or 12 years ago, that I'm using daily or almost and and that I never had the need to modify, ever.
And, besides, "readability" is overrated; I don't know how you geniuses are "reading" code, but I never read source code like a textbook or RFC; when I look at code, it's because I'm debugging it, and after trying to make sense of some maze of stupid abstractions and useless interfaces designed by some deluded manboy, one becomes completely desensitized to the syntax ugliness, just like a hooker becomes desensitized to her clients' smell.
If anything, compact, write-only languages are better, because it's always easier to read 100 lines of badly thought out garbage instead of 10000.
Slashdot Mirror
With this late rise of artificial stupidity, it becomes harder and harder to find /anything/ online.
google is less and less a global grep and more and more of an expert system -- double guessing (always wrong) what I'm really after based on shitty models and trends.
Someone asked me not long ago some detail about some limits in well-known piece of software; All online searches were giving just crap blog posts and other garbage; not a single source code or doc hits; in desperation, I git cloned the source, did a couple of greps and had all wrapped up in 5 minutes. After this, I wrote an answer on a Q/A -- now my crappy answer is the 1st search result everywhere, and no still no reference to primary sources, despite them being prominently linked from my answer.
Sure, everything is easy in my basement. Not so easy on corporate gear.
Why have we to suffer this horror in the first place?
I remember reading a memo by some Microsoft engineer from some 20 years ago who was porting Internet Explorer to Unix; he noticed there that the Unix folk are easily put off by modal dialog boxes and prefer to have be able to open another window or page while a dialog box is active.
Is that no longer the case?
What happened since then? Why do we have to suffer the horror of gnome, which is making its dialog boxes global at display level, and nothing short of a reboot or ssh-ing in from another machine is able to save you from some misbehaving gnome crap?
No, and they still haven't. What they call variable fonts is just a packaging hack -- more than one typeface in the same file.
What I expected was the implementation of an algorithm that will stretch the letters instead of "justifying" (filling up with spaces). That was done in western typography since Gutenberg.
Something like kashida in Arabic, but less dramatic. I know that this kind of microtypography was supported in LaTeX since at least a decade. Is stuff like this supported in CSS? Will it ever be?
For that to work, the parser should backtrack and reparse the expression treating 'else' as a terminal / variable name. That would be an absurd complication, and will hide the fact that keywords aren't symbols. (That's not scheme, where you could bind 'if' and 'for' to whatever you like).
Of course, they could be less anal and write something like 'unexpected keyword "else"', but the parser was probably written in an afternoon 10 years ago and not touched since then.
Try perl, since its parser was 'cleaned up' some years ago. If you forget a quote or a closing '}' you get a hundred pages of error messages (with thousands of "variable may not stay shared" and "Scalar found where operator expected"), with the one mentioning the error line neither at the start or at the end, but hidden somewhere in the middle (if it exists at all!)
Sorry, that was Fortran to C translators.
If I remember correctly, that's how C to Fortran translators worked -- waste a word, don't waste time and code adjusting the indexes to and fro.
No shit. There is a thing called 'caching' -- they would cache the tiles rendered in the most used projections. And it would make no difference to their energy bill -- It's not like everybody is going to use his special projection just to spite google.
You're already able to load your own kml tracks & features with the google maps api -- which works by you giving google some publicly accessible url, and they fetching it and on-demand rendering the vector data into semi-transparent tiles just for you.
And besides, libraries like OpenLayers are able to reproject tiles on the client-side. And most maps data is vector-like (places, roads, countours) which is much better (and faster!) if served raw and rendered by the client.
That's an idiotic thing to say.
By definition, any map projection is a mathematical transformation from an ELLIPSOID to a plane.
The problem with google maps is they don't use an actual projection, but a hack which assumes that the earth is a perfect SPHERE, which is just as pretentiously ignorant as assuming the earth is flat, only less funny.
That kludge was invented in order to simplify the javascript in the pre-canvas/pre-html5/pre-webgl era, it has no redeeming properties beyond that, in spite of its continuing use in most web map applications.
That's not how it works. You use different fonts for different scripts -- no need for eg. a cyrillic font to support hebrew. That's how every program that displays text (browsers, editors) works.
As to emoji and other "non-traditional" characters in a terminal emulator, you could either give up on monospace fonts & cursor-addressability (ie act as a dumb terminal), or display some replacement characters (and show the real widgets when the user hovers the mouse over them). The unicode consortium has long abandoned any pretension to sanity so now we have "woman + school => female teacher" and skin color character modifiers.
I don't know about you, but my fonts were 8x16, not 8x8 grids. And you were able to change the character slots dynamically, no need of huge character tables. That's how that cute arrow cursor was working in FreeBSD's VGA console.
teco
Just like notepad or nano, it was a vi that was always in input mode. A half or quart vi.
It's very easy to get vi more "user friendly". For instance
will make up/down arrows work without switching mode.
(press control-V, esc to enter ^[)
The difference between vi and eg. notepad is "philosophical"; just like the difference between manual and automatic transmission in cars -- anybody who has learned to drive with the former won't find the latter more "user-friendly" at all, but just stupid and annoying.
Then please make noise, maybe someone will finally deign to include some badly needed bug fixes in the upcoming Debian release, especially one related to locking, as well as getting rid of an embarassing security hole someone managed to introduce by blindly messing around with the recovery scripts.
I have a lot of other bug fixes, especially related to multibyte support, but judging by the reactions, it seems that I'm the only nvi user left on Debian; there's hope, however: someone found it worth his time to make the building of the nvi package dependent on systemd ;-)
That's not true. You also know WHOSE KEY was used to log in, and where from. That info is logged by default to /var/log/auth.
But sudo really has a unique feature -- the insults it prints when a bad password was entered. To replicate that, you really need custom mods or whatever.
As to shitty developers & such, I'll notice that the setuid mechanism is not one of the most intuitive or robust features of unix; there are very few people who really understand the split personality and dance between the real, effective and saved-set-uid, and many were badly bitten when writing "safe" code in setuid programs.
What is not mentioned in the summary is that the bug only shows up when using sudo.
Sudo is a nightmare, both technically and psychologically (strangely, it's seems easier to run 'sudo npm' or 'sudo fuck_me' than running the same commands when logged in as root).
It makes me laugh any time when I try to build some shitty program (inside a vm, of course), and more often than not, it tries to run 'sudo' from the install rule and trash over my system by writing and overwriting files inside /usr and /etc, and ignoring any PREFIX option, despite that convention being almost 40 years old.
I really don't understand the appeal of 'sudo' -- what's the problem with ssh root@localhost with public key authentication?
I wish they would flag bot-written pages accordingly, so I could filter them out in searches without having to fetch them first.
I've tried to build an interface where a flag is drawn on a map whereever there's a wikipedia article geolocated there (no matter what language it's in).
Either with the old wikimedia query interface or SPARQL, there's no way to get rid of the flurry of bot written pages, which are simply the same ridiculously innacurate geonames data, formatted into an article just to bump up the number of non-stub pages, or to prove something (what? that some jerk is able to write a crap-flooding script? great!)
Consider this. Worthless garbage -- complete with made-up meteo data and a dozen of references. They have no article about the great inventor but have one about a small mountain in the opposite corner of the earth (that I'm probably the only guy that had the curiosity to climb in this decade).
Of course, I could just filter the worst offenders (eg. the cebuano and southern min wikipedia), but this garbage has started to infect other wikipedias too (eg. the swedish one).
That is the "best of all possible worlds" fallacy. In other words, for someone living in a cage or a basement, learning to swim or ride a bicycle is not "important" enough.
Tribalism has nothing to do with language or culture.
Rwanda is probably the only country in Africa where everybody speaks the same language and dialect, and has the same culture. That didn't prevent the most horrible genocide from happening just there.
The same with Bosnia in Europe.
The fact that Unionists and Republicans in Ulster speak the same language didn't bring them together; the level of distrust and segregation is ridiculous and mind-boggling, even for a third-worlder like me.
Most Catalans, Ukrainians, Irish, etc aren't really speaking their languages in everyday life anymore (despite being forced to learn them in school); and that rather exarcerbated nationalism instead of preventing it.
Most French of "foreign descent" that are populating the depressed "banlieues" are not able to speak any other language than French (and neither were their parents). But that doesn't mean they're accepted as full-fledged citizens; they're still 'Arabs' for all intents and purposes.
That "I am not a robot" shit doesn't work for me either. Not a single time.
I supposed they've only tested it on windows and macs, or only with click-to-focus window managers on linux, or whatever other pretentious inadequacy I came to expect from google. And robots are probably bypassing it just fine.
I haven't studied the subject in any depth, but the thing about how they're able to profile the "tiny movements" of the pointer movement is utter bullshit -- the GUI is already processing the raw pointer data after taking into account mouse acceleration settings, the frequency of the timer interrupt, etc. It doesn't leave much human "noise" in there. Did they release any honest stats about the error rate of that stupid toy?
How could it do that? Has systemd taken over grub/lilo too?
I never used systemd, but I know that the linux *kernel* is passing the command line params to the init program, whatever that is. Go read about it here.
systemd doesn't have to hijack anything in order to complain about params it doesn't understand. Maybe it's just giving itself airs about legit kernel params it considers "illegal"? (the way the stupid bash programmable completion won't let me complete file names to some programs it thinks it knows everything about).
Well, I was able to timestamp things by discreetly embedding their sha hash in the e-mail headers of messages I was posting to different mailing lists. That was not the purpose of the messages, I would've sent them anyway, as part of patch sets and discussion threads. Then they were replicated through dozens of mailing lists archives and hundreds of subscribers -- again, completely oblivious to my abuse of their infrastructure as an "immutable ledger".
This is of course, quite rudimentary and naive, but there are ways to implement an unassailable ledger by piggy-backing on naturally distributed things (peer-to-peer distribution protocols, instagram selfies, etc). An attacker would have then to take over the entire internet, not just over an army of cretinous dorks running their GPUs in cycles. And that would be "free" in terms of resources wasted just to secure the ledger -- a lot of resources are already spent to sent boiler plate & repetitive xml fluff back & forth; that could be put to some good use.
I'm using qemu+kvm with pass-thru usb for that.
I've even hacked qemu so that a usb device could appear inside the vm with a different vendor or product id than the real one (I don't know if they implemented such a feature in qemu or in the usb subsystem of the linux kernel since then).
Qemu has also the advantage that it lets you extend the evaluation period of any software indefinitely, by faking the time inside the vm using its "-rtc base=etc" option and using the -snapshot feature to discard any permanent changes.
What's so broken about it?
If you consider select() just syntax sugar for a jump table, it makes perfect sense for its case label to have the same syntax constraints as goto labels. Why should they respect the underlying block structure? It makes perfect sense that they do not, and it's easy to understand for anyone (unless they insist on considering select() a fancy way of writing an "if()... else if() ... else if() ... else" chain, which it's not).
Maybe allowing any semblance of goto / unstructured code is dangerous in the first place, but that's a completely different argument -- but something's not "broken" if it's working as intended.
Another C "bug" that they took great pains to quash in all C-derived languages is the ability of writing a comma expression inside of an "?:" conditional -- despite "," having lower precedence than "?" or ":" (eg "a = p ? q++, r++ : s"). That was equally dumb -- if such terse syntax as "?:" sucks, then they should've get rid of it completely; forcing people to add another pair of parentheses to their gibberish salad isn't doing anyone any favors.
But it was inferno's vm which supported GC and CSP natively. Of course, if you go through the trouble of building a Lisp machine, you better use Lisp than C to program it.
This is different from go; go programs are executables which run on platforms which do not offer GC services at hardware or system level.
You're like someone touting namespaces, shared envvars between processes, etc as features of the rc shell language instead of features of the plan9 system as a whole -- an rc port which simulates those features in userland would be a stupid toy.
Which is exactly what they did! adding GC to alef was not a winning proposition, so they did the smart thing and rewrote rio, acme, etc in C.
Unfortunately for us, they didn't give up on the idea.
Do not underestimate the snobbery factor. Go is supposedly designed[1] by a bunch a unix/plan9 luminaries, and that alone makes a lot of wannabe high-flying programmers fret in their pants.
[1] based on its underwhelming its design is, the actual work was probably done by some less talented imitators, and Ken Thompson &co just gave it a stamp of approval after fixing some long held pet peeves with C and C-like languages.
The source code isn't worth much if you can't use it to rebuild and install the whole system.
For most android phones and wireless routers the "gpl source code" usually consist of some old / incomplete tarred archive of the linux source code which does NOT correspond to the kernel installed on the device; for many drivers, the source files are a mix of magic numbers and binary arrays; and no change logs or version history are ever provided.
The fact that they're able to pull this shit without anybody crying foul, and making the "source code" available acts like a magical gesture that shies tilfoil-hatters away is rather an indictment of the GPL.
Sure, baby.
When presented with some nasty, convoluted problem (eg. normalize the data from badly scanned documents and identify errors), you can be a "Real Programmer" and get nothing done after months of posturing, or you can be a lazy ass and throw some stupid perl script in half an hour (including debugging) that gets everything in and allows you to concentrate on stuff that is more intellectually rewarding
That's why Perl is so hated by the "Real Programmers" -- because it devalues their stature and trade.
Besides, not all code has to be so much readable. I have perl scripts that I wrote 10 or 12 years ago, that I'm using daily or almost and and that I never had the need to modify, ever.
And, besides, "readability" is overrated; I don't know how you geniuses are "reading" code, but I never read source code like a textbook or RFC; when I look at code, it's because I'm debugging it, and after trying to make sense of some maze of stupid abstractions and useless interfaces designed by some deluded manboy, one becomes completely desensitized to the syntax ugliness, just like a hooker becomes desensitized to her clients' smell.
If anything, compact, write-only languages are better, because it's always easier to read 100 lines of badly thought out garbage instead of 10000.