Imperative

There is a small but turbulent shitstorm on Lobste.rs about Go: https://lobste.rs/s/cclrkn/were_multiple_return_values_go_s_biggest and the key quote, perhaps, is this: I’m always amazed how Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer, with a combined 100+ years experience with PLT and about a dozen languages, are treated as total idiots by people whose greatest hits are building a web app once. There is how I think about it. Back at the late 90s, when suddenly, out of fucking nowhere we have got Internet, FreeBSD and Linux and that Apache httpd, everything seemed to be just as an endless WOW!...

There is another shitstorm around Rust – the just announced meme-effort to verify approximately 7500 unstafe functions in the Rust standard library. First of all, what a joke! I never thought there are that many of em. It is easily more than the whole SML, Ocaml and Haskell standard libraries combined. Or at least of the same order. If we want, however, to put memes aside for a while, the way to safety begins with the proper and sound principles, so the “unsoundness bugs” will never appear again....

There are a few ancient sayings about going around the world, looking for the Truth (which us Out There, you know) and then returning back home only to find It right there. Other ancient thinkers have suggested to look no further than onto your own self (to find all the answers). And, of course, the ultimate resit is I Am That from the Upanishads. There are some manifestations Truths I found going around the world....

It takes time to get more-or-less familiar with the major branches of human knowledge, which is traditionally called a classic education. This gives one, among other things, the ability to see what other people call “connections” between seemingly unrelated “things”. This ability, in turn, helps to see things as they really are, which is the most important part of life, and goes back to the Upanishads and the Buddha. The most difficult and subtle “thing” to see (as it really is), is, of course, your own self, and the habit of doing so, which is called introspection, which ultimately leads to self-knowledge and self-control, is the most sought after ability since beginning of time (at least in the Orient)....

Emacs is a monument (just like Potala palace in Lhasa) of an old-school software engineering and classic languages – it is, indeed, a world heritage site of the golden age of programming. It also could be compared with the ghat complex of Varanasi, which began no one knows when and is constantly changing since then, being reshaped by the “waves” and “tides” of social dynamics. Visiting Emacs is like visiting one of such historic sites, and just like them, it has been re-shaped by the successions of mass-hysteria and zealous over-excitement about bullshit....

The Rust programming language has been hyped as a system programming language, which implies that it has to have an explicit “access” to the hardware-level abstractions, such as the Stack, the Heap and the Procedures, together with the operating system-level abstractions, such as following the particular calling conventions (a set of standardized interfaces) for an “arch and OS /duo”, and to be “aware of” the ABIs in general. Overview Rust is, in principle, an imperative language....