Shell scripts were a mistake. The weirdness you have to remember to safely stop executing when something fails is mind-boggling.

nushell scripts aren’t shellscripts?

exactly. Forking for any reason is the essence of FOSS.

Scenarios like OPs were taken care of right from the start. That’s just the legal side, tho. But someone still needs to do the actual work which is why it sometimes fails.

Public funds.

There actually are lots of initiatives (e.g. https://bigdatastack.eu/european-open-source-initiative ) but it’s still young and there are multiple problems between available public money and contributors actually earning a salary.

Money is not the problem.

either earn a good living being a code monkey, or find a job in a small company that has passion

crazy idea: let’s publicly fund FOSS projects so devs working on stuff they like with a passion can actually make a good living and enable sustainable non-profits to hire expertise, marketing and all the stuff a company needs

the result would be actually good software and happy devs

That was also the time where some classic tunes were created…

25 years in the industry here. As I said there’s nothing against learning something new but I doubt it’s as easy as “leveling up”.

Both fields profit a lot from experience and it’s as much gain for a scientist do become a software dev as an architect becoming a carpenter. It’s simply not productive.

there is so much time lost in research institutes because of shoddy programming

Well, that’s the way it is. Scientific code and production code have different requirements. To me that sounds like “that machine prototype is inefficient - just skip the prototype next time and build the real thing right away.”

It’s always good to learn new stuff but in terms of productivity: Don’t attempt to be a programmer. Rather attempt to write better research code (clean up code, revision control, better commenting, maybe testing…)

Rather try to improve cooperation with programmers, if necessary. Close cooperation, asking stupid questions instead of making assumptions etc. makes the process easy for both of you.

Also don’t be afraid to consult different programmers since beyond a certain level, experience and expertise in programming is vastly fragmented.

Experienced programmers mostly suck on your field and vice versa and that’s a good thing.

Consequence:

Software can only be good, when enough people WANT to work on it and with it along the complete life-cycle. There’s a critical amount of developers/contributors/testers and (feedback providing) users.

Hence a lot of critical consumer stuff is based on popular opensource.

Also, we’re entering an aera where the difference between hardware/firmware/software gets increasingly blurred. So all of this applies to more and more hardware, too.

• do one thing and do it well

byebye unix principles

Extraordinary well written article for people who like math but suck at it. Explains basics but doesn’t get boring.

Maybe Leila Sloman should work on school books. :-)

Zorin

Not sure if I’d trust an OS named like a Bond villain.

I find too verbose comments less annoying than no comments.

Try to describe the bigger picture. Good comments allow understanding the current portion of the code without reading other code.

Also add comments later if you find yourself having to read other code to understand the code you’re currently looking at.

Comments are also a good place to write out abrevations/acronyms.

Never optimize for sourcecode size.

You could do some automated/scripted installation VM-image builder thingy and release that. Would probably also save some manual work for you. (bash script fetching install image & run qemu, autounattend.xml, etc. all nicely released on github.) And it’d be auditable.

that’d be an awesome way to spread malware with some VM evasion.

not sure if any 3rd-party windows install should ever be trusted. no matter what usecase.

What’s surprising? You can basically poke a hole in any living thing and goo will drip out if the hole is large enough.

OP pointed out the fascinating specialty of complete transformation with an intermediate liquid state.

much more important: we’d be years ahead with storage technology.

Secret ballot is not a prerequisite for a democratic process.

What? Of course it is. Hence: “The secret ballot became commonplace for individual citizens in liberal democracies worldwide by the late 20th century.”.

The UK has numbered ballots

secret != anonymous … OPs argument mainly dismissed confidentiality.

But we don’t claim their voting process is undemocratic.

we certainly would if no one checked the number of people simultaniously using a voting booth.

I never assumed this.

Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that. I meant OPs argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_programming might be an interesting read.

Nigeria

It’s not a democratic process then by definition.

mail-in votes technically don’t meet the criteria

Now that’s a valid point. But how bold to assume, the vote was lost because men forced their women to use mail-in. In reality, reasons are much more complex.

It doesn’t need to be constitutional, a simple law is enough.

Sure, if this was some kind of joke poll ignoring the most basic rules of democratic voting, I’ll stand corrected.