The Cube

Authored Comments

Over the years I have come to REALLY HATE systemd. The main reason is that if things to wrong it is nearly impossible to troubleshoot. I upgraded an Ubuntu Linux box a couple of years back, and ever since it only boots correctly maybe 3/4 of the time. Questions on the forum, please for help resulted in either "crickets" or "reinstall". That Linux box has now been DECOMISSIONED - one less Linux box in my environment. No. PLEASE. No.

LISP: Lots of Insipid Stupid Parentheses - that was what we called it back in the 1970's when I learned it (and when a friend and I wrote a LISP interpreter for my Altair) and it still rings true. Academically, it is interesting. Aside from that it is a) hard to read b) hard to debug c) uses a notation that is anything but intuitive and therefore LISP code tends to be hard to write and very hard to maintain, never mind security. FORTH was interesting in its day, too, and was indeed useful on machines with very limited resources. Today it is, and should be, a curiosity. LISP is also a curiosity, and belongs in academia and almost nowhere else, eMacs not withstanding - and on the IBM 704 where it was first conceived - that is vacuum tubes, folks - and the IBM 7090.