faccacta's comments

I often venerate antiques and ancient things by thinking about how they were made. You can look at a 1000-year-old castle and think: This incredible thing was built with mules and craftsmen. Or look at a gorgeous, still-ticking 100-year-old watch and think: This was hand-assembled by an artist. Soon I'll look at something like the pre-2023 Linux kernel or Firefox and think: This was written entirely by people.

Some courts publish word processing templates for briefs; for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit: https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/court-forms-fees/brief-template...

The Eighth Circuit gets really into this, publishing a typography guide for lawyers: https://federalcourt.press/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Eighth...

Judges, particularly appellate judges, spend a lot of their time reading briefs. So, as you can see, some of them have strong opinions about brief typography. (Judges, as a group, have strong opinions about lots of things).

I do a lot of long-form writing. I switched from typing first drafts to writing them and saw improvements in my creativity, organization, and general quality of writing, and also found that I finished my work faster. Then I switched from ballpoints to a fountain pen and saw what all the fuss was about. People who write a lot appreciate how smooth fountain pens are, how the well-designed fountain pens have great ergonomics that reduces hand fatigue, and how the ability to pick your ink can let you fine-tune your writing experience even more. Yes, they can be impractical, and I can absolutely see how disposable ballpoints and rollerballs eventually won the market competition (in the US at least) but modern fountain pens, for some use cases, deserve a try.

Yes, that is what I mean. By the way, on the benchmark game website, is it still possible to sort benchmark results not by speed, but by gzip'd source code size?

Some other examples of what you are talking about: In the regular expression benchmarks, some entries implement their own idiomatic regex parsers or link to the PCRE2 library, rather than use the regex library that comes with the language implementation: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/..., https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

This is, arguably, totally fine, because these are still valid programs that run (and run quickly). BUT, it makes the benchmark programs poor choices to compare the verbosity of languages. So statements like "For a language famed for its terseness, Haskell it turns out, isn’t as terse as expected" can't be supported when comparing benchmark programs that were written to maximize speed, rather than written to minimize developer time.

Fortunately, the Benchmark Game does publish all of its programs, including the ones that don't "win" the speed race, and it's possible to find nice, concise, idiomatic Haskell programs in there.

In 1983 “learning how computers work” was a huge goal for many buyers. Parents bought computers so that kids could learn to use them, which often meant learning to program. (BTW, thank you, mom and dad).

Bar passage rates are falling because law schools have become increasingly theoretical. Many law professors have never had actual clients who pay them for legal work, or have worked as lawyers in the real world for less than five years. These profs are producing interesting academic scholarship but they are increasingly isolated from the legal profession. Law school classes, perhaps as result, tend not to teach what bar exams test: the elements of crimes and torts, how many witnesses are required for a will to be valid, the elements of a valid contact, and so on. These are exactly the things that Californians need their lawyers to know. If too many people are failing the bar exam, the problem isn't the exam, but the prep.

What I appreciate about books like this is that they assume the reader is already familiar with programming, and so the book cuts to the chase and explains why this language is unique and how it is different from the languages the reader probably already knows. The author was smart enough to know that very few students of F# will have picked F# as their very first introduction to programming, so this makes a lot of sense. I get frustrated with programming language tutorials that take the opposite approach and expend multiple screenfuls carefully explaining what a variable is.

Not for this stuff. The EFF has no lobbyists in Washington DC, in fact doesn't even have an office in Washington DC. What they do, they do well: Litigating in court. But don't give them money to influence Congress.