Re: [dev] Article in line with suckless.org

From: Hadrien Lacour <hadrien.lacour_AT_posteo.net>
Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2021 08:59:26 +0000

On Sat, Aug 07, 2021 at 10:34:00AM +0200, Sagar Acharya wrote:
> Just 1 thing needs to be done, make easier for a majority to use minimal, secure software and make it harder for majority to use gigantic, malware injected software. And things would become better.
Sadly not possible, as the whole concept of orthogonality (a requirement for
simplicity) goes against the fact that the majority of people don't want to
tailor the computer to their needs, they want it to "just werk".

To illustrate this with programming, the majority of "programmers" aren't
hackers, they're barely programmers. They want a language with an ecosystem
that gives them packages to do something as simple as padding a string, or a
builtin HTTP server in the standard library

What they don't want is languages like C that tries to give the bare minimum
(although lacking real genericity, which _Generic isn't) while being easy to
compile or like Forth/Lisp/Tcl that gives them IMMEDIATE/defmacro/uplevel and
tell that this is what real power looks like and to get to work if they want to
wield it.


By the way, this sidenote by Paul Graham (to be honest, the whole article:
http://paulgraham.com/avg.html) should be given to read to CS students:
> [3] All languages are equally powerful in the sense of being Turing
> equivalent, but that's not the sense of the word programmers care about. (No
> one wants to program a Turing machine.) The kind of power programmers care
> about may not be formally definable, but one way to explain it would be to
> say that it refers to features you could only get in the less powerful
> language by writing an interpreter for the more powerful language in it. If
> language A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B
> doesn't, that probably doesn't make A more powerful, because you can probably
> write a subroutine to do it in B. But if A supports, say, recursion, and B
> doesn't, that's not likely to be something you can fix by writing library
> functions
Received on Sat Aug 07 2021 - 10:59:26 CEST

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