I don't know Olin Shivers but I've read enough of his writing to know that this acknowledgements section was written with tongue in cheek, and in fact it's a funny enough piece of writing that I've shared it a number of times like the grandparent comment did.
I guess the author was thinking of how cat's original purpose is to concatenate multiple files, not show just one file. (But I certainly don't think using cat in the latter way is a misuse.)
There's also a commonly noted "unnecessary use of cat" where people do this:
cat file.txt | grep foo
instead of this:
<file.txt grep.foo
but that's not relevant to bat (which can be used unnecessarily in the same way).
(1) lack of primitive hash tables (2) lack of primitive arrays
I'll note that if there are primitive arrays and the compiler optimizes arithmetic, the rest of the hash table can be implemented in Bel.
Also, maybe a Sufficiently Smart Compiler could prove that a list's cdrs will never change, store it in cdr-coded form, and treat it like an array (with the ability to zoom right to, say, element 74087 without chasing a bunch of pointers).
The “stair-steps” you see in your DAW when you zoom up on a digital waveform only exist inside the computer. [...] When digital audio is played back in the Real World, the reconstruction filter doesn’t reproduce those stair-steps – and the audio becomes truly analogue again.
I don't like them at all but I do most of my Netflixing on my iPhone, where it doesn't happen.
(When I do go to the Netflix site in a web browser I sometimes temporarily use "Mute site" which is a pretty crazy thing for a site for watching movies to make you want to do!)
“[A]lmost anything ending in ‘x’ may form plurals in ‘-xen’ (see VAXen and boxen in the main text). Even words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way; e.g., ‘soxen’ for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are the Hebrew-style ‘frobbotzim’ for the plural of ‘frobbozz’ (see frobnitz) and ‘Unices’ and ‘Twenices’ (rather than ‘Unixes’ and ‘Twenexes’; see Unix, TWENEX in main text). [...] The pattern here [...] is generalization of an inflectional rule that in English is either an import or a fossil (such as the Hebrew plural ending ‘-im’, or the Anglo-Saxon plural suffix ‘-en’) to cases where it isn't normally considered to apply. This [...] is grammatical creativity, a form of playfulness.”
I upvoted this because it seems to make some good points and I think the topic is interesting and important, but I can't understand why the "Then, why some free software projects use xz?" section does not mention xz's main selling point of being better than other commonly used alternatives at compressing things to smaller sizes.
That is what it means. Note that the lines ("edges" in graph theory terms) can cross each other.
Nelson asked: What is the smallest number of colors that you’d need to color any such graph, even one formed by linking an infinite number of vertices?
The Wikipedia page describes the infinite-vertices version of this graph as
an infinite graph with all points of the plane as vertices and with an edge between two vertices if and only if the distance between the two points is 1.
This of course is impossible to draw but Wikipedia shows seven-vertex and ten-vertex subgraphs of it:
Formatting the quote like this makes it too wide to be readable on my phone without repeatedly scrolling right then left. Even in landscape mode the first line ends with the "b" of "brightly painted".
A lot of people format quotes with italics, as in this example:
RFC 2392 Message-ID values are supposed to be unique, but they may not be if the software generating them is buggy. I remember reading somewhere about some email program that assumed they were unique (in effect using them as a natural key). If you were unlucky enough to get messages with identical Message-ID values, all but one would disappear.
Esperanto has many many more speakers! (People joke about Klingon having more but it's not true.) Really accurate numbers are hard to come by but even based on estimates, it's no contest:
"Arika Okrent guessed in her book In the Land of Invented Languages that there might be 20–30 fluent [Klingon] speakers."[1]
"In 2009 Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven used 2001 year census data from Hungary and Lithuania as a base for an estimate, resulting in approximately 160,000 to 300,000 to speak [Esperanto] actively or fluently throughout the world, with about 80,000 to 150,000 of these being in the European Union."[2]
In fact, Klingon has fewer total speakers than Esperanto has native
speakers:
"As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there are currently around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000 children. In all known cases, speakers are natively bilingual, or multilingual, raised in both Esperanto and either the local national language or the native language of their parents."[3]
(Also Esperanto is much easier than Klingon, has much more material to read, and is spoken by a wider variety of people than just science fiction fans, though there are plenty of those too.)
EDIT: The "160,000 to 300,000" quote was from an older version of the Wikipedia page (I based this comment on an old comment of mine). The current version has various estimates, including Lindstedt's ballpark figures of "10,000 speak it fluently" and "100,000 can use it actively".
It would be nice if Go made a new i for each iteration of the loop.
Lua 5.0 made just one loop variable per loop, like Go apparently does. When I first ran into this behavior, I thought that, although it wasn't what I expected, it made at least as much sense as what I was expecting. Since then, every single time I've been in a situation where the two ways of doing it gave different results, I've wanted the "separate variable for each iteration" behavior, so I was glad when Lua's creators changed loop variables to work like this in Lua 5.1.
(Before this change I would just do the Lua equivalent of your "Creates a new `i`" line.)
I have talked to other people who found CGI Peter Cushing convincing but I did not. I'm confident I would have picked him out as CGI even if I hadn't recognized him as a long-dead actor. (Same for CGI young Carrie Fisher.)
(Still impressive, though, and I expect the uncanny valley to be bridged within the next five, maybe ten years.)