Yeah, but no governemt is lucky with having people operate entirely freely. It makes corruption difficult, and every government has corruption to some degree

Once again proving that they dont know how any of this works. And still getting re-elected

Boredom or laziness. On my mobile firefox, i sometimes don't close tabs for months

there are still a lot of destroyed documents being stored around the world (say, from the StaSi for example). I would love to see this applied on them. It migjt shed some light on things supposedly lost to history.

Do you actually think these documents remain destroyed for technical reasons? Of 90.000 official and 200.000 unofficial employees of the Stasi (secret police of the German Democratic Republic), a whopping 20 have been convicted. Do you think that's because the powers that be couldn't do better?

The official excuse is that whatever the Stasi did was lawful at the time. The same logic would have made the Nuremberg Trials impossible, but it wasn't applied. That's not an accident.

Some way to fix the image would certainly help, but you still need to find a way to scan all the parts and put them in the right direction.

Moreover, some of those documents may have been destroyed for very valid reasons.

Sliding a bit off topic but what would be a valid reason for them to have been destroyed? Other than masking history, which I'm sure is valid for some, for most it's not a great thing.

The internal security agencies of repressive governments are very good in general at collecting people's secrets for use as weapons. There's no potential for harm that I can see in destroying such information, and considerable potential for harm in recovering it.

Well, thats what happened to ACTA too, isn't it?

A lot of the stuff that was in there got reused in TTIP.

You may be thinking of IPRED, not TTIP? IPRED popped up at some point during the anti-ACTA protests and seemed to have significant overlap.

I don't see the overlap of ACTA with TTIP.

> on one hand, i would say 'some people have too much free time'

I'd say, that's why free time is awesome, and we need much more of it.

He's right there. Like every other skill, gaining the right temperament is a task that requires a lot of time and self discipline.

Agreed. It took me years to learn that listening is valuable (to me), and that it's not merely being silent until it's my turn.

Listening, and patience in general, are skills far too few these days, especially because many people falsely view them only as "sitting still"

This makes a whol lot of good points. C is really not suited for most modern applications, and some of its design choices are questionable (to say the least).

On the other hand: In my opinion, C is a good language to show beginning programmers how memory management is done. Basically, it could be a third learned language, after a scrip language (like python) and an OOP language (Java or C++).

It's hard to figure out which are the good points and which are hyperbole. "EDSAC was the second electronic digital stored-program computer to go into regular service" and with "the world's first assembler" dating from 1949, says the Wikipedia reference. As such, many languages can be traced back to that "Most Godawful Computer on Earth (TM)".

Or, "4. ALGOL60 [4] had many nice features of languages today but was too theoretical: only existed on paper." Yet its reference 4, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_60#ALGOL_60_implementati... , lists a number of ALGOL60 implementations even in the 1960s.

Hyperbole and reference will probably be worked on in next one. ALGOL mostly existed on paper or in complex compilers on expensive systems. The "computer" that is the EDSAC is not on that list. So, they would have to build their own ALGOL... a difficult thing anyway in that period... using a machine and process like this:

https://youtu.be/6v4Juzn10gM?t=3m41s

Can you imagine trying to make a robust, fast compiler for such a weak machine in tape batches on that weak machine? I could understand them giving up with BCPL as a useful result on that machine. The cost-benefit analysis of using a PDP-11 like an EDSAC is opposite. Wirth et al showed you could do better. C inventors just liked BCPL. I'd understand if they used BCPL to bootstrap a Modula-2 or other ALGOL subset with good design. Instead, they kept trying to force BCPL to do something it wasn't designed for... wait, it wasn't designed period lol. It was just what compiled on a 1940's calculating device.

It's bad foundations vs others' good foundations. Might have worked for them sure. Today, though, we need to know why they did it that way and why we definitely shouldn't if we don't absolutely have to. That's the point of the essay. Plus, to clear up associated misinformation.

Algol60 could never be taken seriously as a mainstream language, lacking Algol-like syntax.

Algol60 lacked Algol-like syntax?

In one sense, that's almost tautologically impossible. I presume you mean "like the other Algols", which makes it a non-absurd statement, but... could you expand or clarify what you mean here?

I believe it's a joke. Gold isn't a gold-like substance because it is gold. Algol isn't an Algol-like language because it's Algol.

If so, I don't believe it's a good joke.

It's a joke, but not the one you thought.

The joke is that the syntax of Algol didn't actually look all that much like what people mean when they say "Algol-like syntax". No curly braces anywhere to be seen.

As my introduction to Algol-like languages was through Pascal, the joke completely passed me by.

I could see that putting you in a place where encountering people misusing "Algol-like" to mean C-like, when trying to distinguish from something more like Algol, would be extra noticeable and annoying.

Likely you have just been lucky :)

I hang around computational chemists. They wouldn't say "Algol-like" in the first place. So, double lucky!

It's often said that you won't be a programmer until you understand pointers, but my own experience was the other way around: I didn't understand pointers until after I had been programming in languages like C# and Java for a long time.

I had first started out in C, hacked around for a while, even made a few simple programs. But I wasn't ever able to get very far with it. My first Java app had me doing GUI programming right away and I was making things a lot faster than I could have ever done in C.

The problem was, there are two things a beginner needs to learn: how to solve problems with programming, and the particular programming language they are using. So I think it's best to keep one of those things very, very simple. And you tend to lose a lot of people from boredom if that thing is the types of problems you're solving. So we have to default to the language being simple.

Pointers and memory management are an implementation detail. They are important, but they aren't the job. The job is fulfilling requirements. Some days the requirements might be "fit inside this tiny box of memory", but it's far more likely to be "so, like, when I click on the link, the screen flickers. <you mean a new page loads?> Yeah, whatever, just make it stop flickering."

But the USA will bend the rules anyway, wether it lies within their jurisdiction or not. Thing is, if it does not lie within theiir jurisdiction, the international fallout might be of more significance. Yet with ICANN staying state-side, i doubt it will make any difference anyways.