Today's wiki page: Fighting is boring.

Terri is working on some cool stuff.

On most technical forums, and even when IRC is not being technical, I tend to hold off on volunteering opinions because I don’t want to seem, I suppose, arrogant, and because someone else probably knows better what they’re talking about. (Of course, sometimes they don’t, and I get mad, but I try not to e.g. splatter it all over Planet.)

I’ve kind of kept at this thing (9 years and counting...) despite that making me feel like I do not even remotely fit in. School is a similar environment it this country. I never spoke up in class, but at least I had the privilege to do so without someone saying “oh, what could they possibly know, they’re a girl.” But that attitude’s still around, and our term papers aren’t still going to be due if we wasted all our time being loud obnoxious pricks. The smaller the stakes, the more energy you can waste picking on people who are different.

Perhaps we don’t do this because we’re sexist; perhaps we’re sexist because we do this.

Occasionally I see an absurd discussion like this one continue to drag itself out and I feel sort of guilty for writing one of the big “minimalist” things. The point of writing less code is not to conserve memory or cycles or soothe some “first thing we’ll do, let’s purge all the libraries” fetish. The point is to only write what you want to express. If a feature would require that to get lost in a bunch of dreary nonsense, then it’s not worth it. If there’s a library you can call that lets you say the what and not the how, then it is.

More importantly if there’s a standard program that you can call that’s the same standard program that everyone has agreed on for decades and that saves you from implementing a protocol which you are obviously not smart enough to implement on your own, then you just shut up and fucking call it. And if that causes you to realize that your program is pointless, don’t write it.

Not writing it is the least amount of code you can produce. And that is the best possible thing you can do. That’s what this unix thing is all about. Those who do not understand it are condemned to reimplement it, poorly.

An oldie, but a goodie which I found again researching the Dolphy quote. Am totally putting that album on when I get home.