your source for Game Z
I woke up to a huge gut punch this morning: Bram Moolenaar, legendary author of the Vim text editor, has passed away. Given the occasion, I want to express some thoughts regarding both Bram and his software. Without his work, I'm not sure I would be the same person.
I've been asked a few times over the years why I chose to learn C with the colloquially-known "K&R C Bible", and specifically the Category-0 style, coined on USENET back in the day.
For those unfamiliar, I'm talking about The C Programming Language, 2nd Ed.,
by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the creators of the language. In it are
a series of exercises that the reader can work on to build their knowledge of
C through actually building something with it. On comp.lang.c, people would
share their solutions to exercises in this book. After a while, they coined
different categories of solutions, to refer to their robustness and complexity.
Category-0 is solving each exercise using only the knowledge the book gives you, up to that point. In other words, it's to approach it as a complete newbie and see what you can put together using only the stuff you've learned in the book.
Ever since Mark Zuckerburg pitched the Metaverse, the "Web 3.0" buzzword blew up, describing a "Web" that is backed by cryptocurrency-like ledgers. Proof of work, proof of stake, etc. NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are also involved in a scene like this.
What in this picture is an evolution of existing Web technology? How does this enhance the state of hypertext? To me, this is Meta's vision for their next Web product. It is not a new version of an existing, open platform. It has nothing to offer me as a programmer, gamer, writer, or server admin. It seems to be the mixture of NFT scamming, VR, and botnet. It looks like an addiction chamber for whales.
It seems that the systemd debate has made its way to Alpine Linux, and naturally that gets people out of the woodwork to bang their drum about it again. The irony's not lost, either. It's really tiring to see people complain about politics, in a software movement that's entirely about the politics of software to begin with. Have you guys forgotten why we're here? Are you more open source instead of free software? That's still a political statement; one of practicality and reduced costs.
I came home today and strolled my usual Web haunts before diving into the Underground, and stumbled across a piece by GNOME developer jwestman, titled Platforms, Compatibility, and the Future of the Free Desktop. In it, he advocates for GNOME (and by extension XDG) to become the platform that "everyone can work on together". Isn't it funny that the kind of people that suggest this are always talking about the platforms, software, or APIs that they have control over? Does this person not understand why people choose other software, or choose to create something different? Do they not understand the risks present when the vast majority of your userbase is on one or two platforms and a 0-day is found?