The response to this piece has been remarkably broad and positive. I have to note, though, that I didn’t write it as a nostalgia trip – I don’t miss underpowered computers, primitive tools, and tiny low-resolution displays. At least people did notice that it isn’t a you-kids-get-off-my-lawn grumble. I think it’s good for younger hackers… Continue reading Things Every Hacker Once Knew: 1.2
Month: January 2017
Things Every Hacker Once Knew
As promised in the comments on my last post, here it is: Things Every Hacker Once Knew Comments and corrections welcome.
Tools generate culture: a trivial example
If I were the kind of person who grumbles about feeling ancient, I’d have been doing it today. I got reminded that younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII like their tongues know the back of their teeth. Man, we all grokked that back when I was new at this. Nowadays not so… Continue reading Tools generate culture: a trivial example
Rust and the limits of swarm design
In my last blog post I expressed my severe disappointment with the gap between the Rust language in theory (as I had read about it) and the Rust language in practice, as I encountered it when I actually tried to write something in it. Part of what I hoped for was a constructive response from… Continue reading Rust and the limits of swarm design
Rust severely disappoints me
I wanted to like Rust. I really did. I’ve been investigating it for months, from the outside, as a C replacement with stronger correctness guarantees that we could use for NTPsec. I finally cleared my queue enough that I could spend a week learning Rust. I was evaluating it in contrast with Go, which I… Continue reading Rust severely disappoints me
How to educate me about prejudice in the open-source community
Every once in a while I post something just to have it handy as a reference for the next time I have to deal with a galloping case of some particular kind of sloppy thinking. That way I don’t have to generate an individual explanation, but can simply point at my general standards of evidence.… Continue reading How to educate me about prejudice in the open-source community