Tayssir John Gabbour

In case you want to know about the people marking up the pages here, I like many aspects of technology, but am not a technologist since I don't think it's a good solution for every problem. For some reason I like these little cute "do X in many languages" because they're really fast to do, basic, and let one think about readability-in-the-small.

I find that having built my own unit testing framework tends to save me some embarrassments, because it's really easy to test with; no need to think at all. I have to say I wasn't a fan of JUnit. But Python's doctest module is nice... some problems of course, like its massive dependence on strings, but within its limitations it's fine.

I like lisp since it's a very natural way to think: (idea thing thing thing), or perhaps:

 (idea thing
       (idea thing)
       thing)

I suppose lisp is a little notorious, and I don't know what to say. The modern software engineering community are a questioning bunch, and I think the last generation was too much wrapped up in saying how good lisp is, that they had no intention to offer people a real picture. So I wrote some vignettes in LispUsersAreArrogant. My perspective on how lispers perceive things.

Before that, I wrote up Strawman/Counter combinations for LispStrawMen, since the sheer repetitiveness of disinformation was enormous, and for some reason these usenet lispers seemed fine with repeating themselves endlessly. There are of course some issues with Common Lisp, and sharp people will notice them. But a lot of it is like saying that "Java doesn't have functions, only classes."

The age of not having to use tools you don't want is coming to a close. Finally.

[all games must come to an end]

Your site's up come back to biz! No sunday 4 you!

To randomly add a small positive note on top of this very nasty business, I was quite amused by your comment:

I remember a couple people discussed the success of lectures, and I casually joked about how Erik Naggum would be a top draw. Ooo boy. Heads perk up at He Who Must Not be Named. People unknotted from their private conversations. I escaped the carnage by talking with my friend, who didn?t know and didn?t care about some random Erik fellow.

-- DougMerritt

Hey Tayssir,

here's a reference:

Things were initially not that different here. From the early days of the nineteenth century, business and government were resolutely determined to stamp out the free expression of ideas. The first resort were the seditious libel and blasphemy laws, which essentially outlawed all challenges to the status quo. When these failed to have the desired effect, elites turned to newspaper stamp duty and taxes on paper and advertisements to price radical journals out of the market. Between 1789 and 1815, stamp duty was increased by 266 per cent, helping to ensure, as Lord Castlereagh put it, that "persons exercising the power of the press" would be “men of some respectability and property"; the point being that these more "respectable" owners of the press "would conduct them in a more respectable manner than was likely to be the result of pauper management", as Cresset Pelham observed at the time.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=9465 ( BrokenLink )

It's an interesting thing since it implies the newspaper technology's price was artificially elevated by politics. --RK

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