there  could  be  snakes  in  here

... there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. – GH Hardy, with "men" sic . When someone raises points we don't like, there's always the temptation to spitefully psychologise them, to dismiss their points by reference to who they are, rather than the falsity or fallacy of what they're saying. * It is a universal trick; you'll probably have heard some version of it today ("yeah but he's a straight white dude "; " a syphilitic neurotic "; "ancestrally a victim of the British Empire "; " a woman "). In nominally rational subcultures like academia or literary society, there are some weak barriers to doing this (though Freud's brutal legacy continues to enable awful behaviour even there). In pop music and its journalism there is absolutely nothing to stop you. Here...

A good friend of mine is quite horrified by the present trend towards web app replacements for more and more core development work and architecture; such apps are, after all, a grave violation of the elegance and security of good old POSIX APIs . (Who can doubt that some people will use these unsecured client-server apps to work with confidential data? How much user foolishness are architects duty-bound to anticipate and preclude? Answer: surely more than this.) The browser itself is already my debugger, linker, compiler, and garbage collector; the following lovely tools tempt us to concentrate more and more of our work into this one subjective spot - all running, objectively, on other people's computers . (Another transgression against the best old way .) But aren't they lovely: Repl.it . Futuristic feeling: offers command lines for two dozen languages and saves shareable sessions for each. Very damn fast too; try running factorial(2000) on it. An incredible educa...