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RichardFord | 11 years ago | on: When Will Self Driving Cars Become Mandatory?

I'm guessing in about 20 years you'll start seeing propaganda to force it.

But that's just the beginning. After that you'll start seeing some kind of kill switch being mandatory. Then you'll start seeing more regulations to dissuade people from even owning cars, autonomous or not. And then of course the final step is to impose "sign ups" for when you want to use some government vehicle (all in the name of global warming, or whatever name they'll switch to by then).

RichardFord | 11 years ago | on: Times Articles Removed from Google Results in Europe

Unlike in the United States, where freedom of expression is a fundamental right that supersedes other interests, Europe views an individual’s privacy and freedom of expression as almost equal rights.

Except everybody knows that the right privacy is not the reason. EUrocrats needed to use subterfuge as an opening salvo for the beginnings of censorship, so this is what they came up with.

But there's no surprise that NYT would give the EU the benefit of the doubt, since they tend to fawn all over whatever wacky EU policies are implemented anyway.

RichardFord | 11 years ago | on: The Larch Environment

This is a step in the right direction. I'm always looking for new tools that help in understanding code bases and streamline workflows.

The inline table is cool. I like the idea of embedded documentation like that, as long as its structured in a way that can be turned on-off.

The Scala plugins for Intellij and Eclipse both have worksheets, which I think as of REPLs on steroids.

The one thing I'm still missing from most mainstream development environments though is interaction of live, running programs - the kind seen in Common Lisp and Smalltalk.

Java has it kindof, then enhanced more with JavaRebel (a commercial tool). .NET edit-n-continue is still frustratingly crippled in many ways.

I still feel like I'm programming in a batch environment instead of "molding" my code though.

RichardFord | 11 years ago | on: Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?

Yeah, she was way too gung-ho about potentially forcing this stuff on people via the water supply. But I'm not surprised that an academic would want to social-engineer this way.

RichardFord | 11 years ago | on: Taking it to Th’emacs

Emacs is my preferred text editor. I don’t use old-fashioned text editors as much as I used to, because I often need more specialized tools. I use IDEs for various programming languages and other things when producing high quality documents. And yet, I often wish I could subsume these with a tool that had the basic goodness of emacs.

I love the ease of customization of Emacs and other text editors, but they're just plain dumb when it comes to knowing programming languages.

RichardFord | 11 years ago | on: Resistance to the Linux Desktop

The author (and others who use desktop Linux) can't be happy with his personal choice of desktop. Instead he's bitter and angry that others don't make the same choice that he does. That's way too common in many facets of life these days.

There are many factors why desktop Linux didn't take off. One is the whole Gnome/GTK+/KDE/Qt debacle. Many know the details, but with limited resources and not being radical enough in your designs, then there had to be more collaboration and not division (Gnome vs KDE).

Distros were similar enough to not be very differential, but incompatible enough to make support a nightmare for ISVs.

The other direction that could have been taken is a whole lot more experimentation with radical designs. Trying to be better than Windows was always going to be a losing strategy. Just don't be Windows.

I guess there is some redemption in Android, but I think the diehards will never accept Android as a real desktop Linux.

RichardFord | 11 years ago | on: Dylan: the harsh realities of the market

I really like Dylan, but it has a huge problem that never gets discussed - verbosity. The syntax is entirely too verbose for a modern language. My suggestion would be to first complete the Intellij plugin and then actually change the syntax so it can compete with the scripting languages.

RichardFord | 11 years ago | on: Why I Left the .NET Framework

I'm loving the .NET framework as a career. When it comes down to it we have 2 major choices to choose from - Java and .NET framework, with a smattering of Python around.

Given those two choices I'll take C# any day over Java. Where Java has it right is in the ecosystem. It's more mature for obvious reasons and has great alternative language communities - Clojure and Scala. We have F#, which is great.

But for day to programming, I don't think Java and Intellij beats Visual Studio and Resharper. You can become very productive with VS/ReSharper and C#.

RichardFord | 11 years ago | on: Drop that spoon: The truth about breakfast cereals (2010)

It's going in the wrong direction. Instead of empowering people to make good decisions, you're advocating putting a government gun to the heads of people to make them make healthy choices.

So are you going to throw more people in prison for the illegal sugar trade?

It never ceases amaze me how many people on HN actually advocate these draconian, statist policies. Stop hating on your fellow man.

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