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Nine Horrible Programming Languages That No-One Will Ever Use, And Lua

Well, it's more honest than the original title of the article.

One thing language designers keep forgetting is that syntax matters.  Your language may work semantic magic, but if it's unwriteable and unreadable, programmers will ignore it.  And that's the sad truth of nine out of the ten languages mentioned here.  Lisp and Smalltalk were never successful and never will be, and it's clearly not because they lack expressive power.  It's because the syntax is so goddam ugly.

Logo has the power of Lisp and a syntax that's only a little weird; unfortunately, it got pigeonholed as a children's teaching language.  The rest of the Lisp derivatives are just plain horrible.  Smalltalk and Objective C too.  And don't get me started on Forth.

Lua has some annoying quirks that keep it from being the perfect language. For example, you don't have named parameters in function calls, but you can fake it by using an f{} call instead of an f() call.  That makes perfect sense in the context of Lua's design, but it's confusing as hell for a new user.  Oh, and it uses .. as a string concatenation operator, which is just vile.  Overall, though, it's clean enough for me to adopt it as the new Minx scripting language.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:15 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Early Christmas Present

iiNet just bumped up my monthly quota by another 60GB.  Despite downloading Dragon Age and Mass Effect on Steam and all five Debian DVDs, I didn't hit my quota last month, so I don't know what I'll do with it all.  (Actually, about 40% of the Steam downloads and all of Debian came from iiNet's free zone and didn't count against my quota anyway.)

Well, I could go down to the next cheaper plan and still have more bandwidth than I did after the last increase, or go down two steps and have nearly as much bandwidth as when I signed up.

Or I could subscribe to every podcast on the planet, rather than (as now) only half of them.

Or I could just run daily off-site backups of the whole of mu.nu and mee.nu.

Decisions, decisions...

If they'd done this two days ago I would have had the extra 60GB for last month as well...  And would have had to somehow use it all in a day.  Oh, and they don't count uploads at all, so seeding torrents is out.

They've also bumped the shaped speed (what you get when you exceed your quota) from 64k to 128k.  Still really really slow, but only half as really really slow as before.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:11 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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My Hobby Is Reading The HTML Rather Than The Web Page

<meta name="description" content="ZOMG! Find out if you have swine flu!" />
<meta name="keywords" content="swine, flu, swine flu, do i have swine flu, do i?, I HAVE SWINE FLU!?, SHIT!, I'M DEAD!, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!, RUN REDDIT! RUN!" />
<meta name="author" content="Pigsy McFlu" />

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:12 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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