/tech/ - Technology★

Back to your containment thread.

>>928175 (OP)

>In short: the Web sucks because of C programmers. Why should the browser understand all the HTML versions? Why should the browser understand all the file/encoding formats? Why can't we have universal (hackable, meta) standards? Why do we even NEED web standards - Why is nothing programmable in real time?

I think the problem is more like the web is built strictly to a server <-> Client model

>A naive person would probably ask "if I let an arbitrary program from the network run on my computer, what stops that program from getting into my personal files, snooping around my local network, etc.?" Sun Microsystems assures you that its Java engineering staff has thought of every contingency and that Java is completely safe. This is the same company that was unable to make their operating system's mailer secure. Thus, Robert Morris, a graduate student at Cornell, was able to write a simple program that took over every Sun Unix workstation on the Internet

and last time i bothered to check in 2008, this was still a problem, and probably still is for the 3 systems that use the Java sandbox today.

>Try to demonstrate the Web to someone who has never seen the Internet or Unix. Your friend's first questions will invariably be "How come it is so slow?"

And this is still a problem in 2018.

>and "How come we couldn't get to that site?"

Don't worry goy this problem has been solved by Cloudfare.

>A naive mind might assume that HTML was designed by a bunch of people who sat down with 100 documents of different types and said "let's not leave the table until we've put enough richness into this language to capture the authors' and designers' intent for at least 98 of the documents."

Software used to be designed like that in the 60s, and it still was outside the UNIX culture, like Ada and Lisp machines. If you replace documents with programs, that describes how PL/I was designed.

>Ever since the advent of the programming language C, however, this is not how software is designed.

This is why so much software sucks today.

>Instead of asking "how can we fulfil user requirements?" C programmers ask "how many of the features that were commonly available in 1970 can I add to my program without it crashing (too often)?"

That's basically what Plan 9 is, right down to the "how many of the features that were commonly available in 1970" part. Dynamic linking is "too hard" to get right when you have to use C, so they don't do it.

Some Andrew weenie, writing of Unix buffer-length bugs, says:
> The big ones are grep(1) and sort(1).  Their "silent
> truncation" have introduced the most heinous of subtle bugs
> in shell script database programs.  Bugs that don't show up
> until the system has been working perfectly for a long time,
> and when they do show up, their only clue might be that some
> inverted index doesn't have as many matches as were expected.


Unix encourages, by egregious example, the most
irresponsible programming style imaginable.  No error
checking.  No error messages.  No conscience.  If a student
here turned in code like that, I'd flunk his ass.

Unix software comes as close to real software as Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles comes to the classic Three Musketeers:
a childish, vulgar, totally unsatisfying imitation.

>>928264

Show proof of (((lisp))) machines' superiority or fuck off.

>muh GC

>muh tagged memory

>muh debugger

Inferior.

>>928177

Back to >>>/leftypol/

or >>>/cuckchan/ if you are a newfag

>>928175 (OP)

>A formatting language too wimpy even for a novel.

What does this even mean? You can have a novel in plaintext with no formatting at all.

Though, saying that, I despise that HTML can't tell paragraphs apart, that it needs to be told, which even nroff is smart enough to understand.

>>928286

Maybe the web should be LaTeX-based instead of HTML-based?

>>928291

Why don't you make a LaTeX based browser?

webassembly shill, fuck off pls.

>>928291

>LaTeX

I swear this is a religion at this point. You're like Jehova's Witnesses of software.

>>928329

Use FrameMaker you CLI troglodytes

The thing I don't get about all of this Unix and C hate is: what, exactly, do you expect us to do about it? Surely you're not suggesting that Windows 10 is the spiritual successor of the Lisp machine? Am I supposed to take out a 2nd mortgage on my house (assuming that would even be enough) and buy an antique Lisp machine at auction? Then do what with it? Sit around and admire its internal coherence and consistency?

Ok, Unix sucks. What am I supposed to use instead? Ok, C sucks. Maybe I should use Python, instead. Whoops. The main implementation is in C. Fine, Ruby. Whoops. Main implementation also in C. Okay, the Web sucks. Unfortunately, there's a lot of useful stuff on the Web that's not available elsewhere.

So, again, what am I supposed to do with this information, Unix haters? And what are YOU doing with it?

>>928175 (OP)

>Why do we even NEED web standards

You've lost the fucking plot m8.

>>928431

Read the sentence that precedes it. It isn't unthinkable to have one universal/meta sandbox standard for all media formats; same for everything relating to text/formatting. But that would too hard for the mouth-breathers that use Facebook to understand.

>>928428

There are (good) languages where both the compiler/interpreter is written in the language - FreePascal* and SBCL* for example. The SBCL compiler directly converts Lisp to assembly, which is very interesting.

*https://www.freepascal.org/advantage.var

*http://www.sbcl.org/sbcl-internals/

>>928435

See also:

http://wiki.freepascal.org/Why_use_Pascal

>>928435

did you finish that lisp os yet?

>>928435

http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html

SBCL is available only on Unix, Unix-like OSs, and Windows, and it appears to be developed primarily on Linux. So even if SBCL Lisp is a nicer language/environment than C, you're still using it in the context of Unix (or Windows), and I suspect that most non-trivial programs would make significant use of the C FFI.

What non-trivial, useful programs that I can download and try are written using SBCL? Or FreePascal?

>>928437

Have _you_ written your own OS? Writing a modern OS from scratch (TempleOS doesn't count, it isn't modern) is impossible without manpower, so no, I haven't.

>>928440

I didn't say modern. Get to it! Chop chop!

Funny how both this article (from 1995) and the notorious poster here both references The Unix Haters handbook.

Now, C hater poster (I don't like using this term but is the best fit) the amount of energy you waste here criticizing *nix and C lang would be much used building a time machine to take you back to the 70's.

Why build a time machine? Because it's much easier than build a functional Lisp Machine.

>everything is bad waaah waaaah

>>928436

That doesn't do a good job of telling me why I should use Pascal. Most of the points are weak or vague. If they want to convince anyone, they need to show something that's ugly or dangerous to do in C, and then the same thing in Pascal, and show why it's better.

>>928441

A lisp OS for X86 already exists.

Pure Common Lisp too, so shitposters can't get away with their typical 'but it's actually C' line.

https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

CL is going through something of a renaissance at the moment, there's a lot of community activity.

>>928512

Bootloader isn't LISP.

The UNIX hater newsgroup was where we stored our autistic lolcows in the '90s. I don't know why it suddenly started getting referenced. It was literally the first containment thread.

Could we please have a lisp library that is as complete as the Python SciPy collection?

>>928574

No, as lisp programmers don't actually program.

>>928304

Kirby is right as always.