Xah Talk Show 2019-10-16 laputa, gulliver's travels, truncate lines, line based syntax, unix philosophy damage to society
topics talked:
- personal tutorial $100 / 3 hours. emacs, emacs lisp, JavaScript in depth + dom, from the ground up
- Laputa in Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver's Travels. PART III. A VOYAGE TO LAPUTA, BALNIBARBI, LUGGNAGG, GLUBBDUBDRIB, AND JAPAN.
- Dactyl keyboard
- Dactyl Manuform Keyboard
- Trackballs That Can Spin
- number of lines of code is a common metric of how complex or big of a software
- lines of code is the most idiotic metric
- lines of code originates from unix
- unix in 1980s, and 1990s, silently truncate lines that's beyond 70 or 80 chars. Including, ps, tar,
- Unix, RFC, Line Truncation
- UNIX Tar Problem: File Length Truncation, Unicode Name Support
- line hardwrap ~70 chars, from punchcards, a crime
harmful consequences:
- email spec says everybody must truncate lines
- the problem of email quoting with greater than equal sign for every line
- the design of programing language syntax that are line oriented
- hard coded formatting, ascii digram
- golang gofmt problem
package main; import "fmt"; func main() { fmt.Printf("%v\n", 33) }