> Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for ... four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it.
> People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I
Interesting take on Python there, not sure it's aged well:
> Well, they're just like the Smalltalk folks, who waited forever to replace C++, and then Java came along and screwed them royally, and permanently. Oops. Ruby's doing exactly that to Python, right now, today. Practically overnight.
> Python would have taken over the world, but it has two fatal flaws: the whitespace thing, and the permafrost thing.
That being said, I'm not sure he would have predicted that data science would be what pushed Python into a better place. Very few people would have, certainly around 2004 or earlier when he was writing it.
> In Germany, a Herr Doktor is always right (they have forgiven Moses by now for not having space on the stone tablets, but it really is the 11th Commandment)
> Pro tip: don't look in the kitchen when governments brew up safety critical systems. I was scared to fly over Germany for a while...
The author has a lovely writing style for this kind of content.
I liked the account but to be honest this line about Herr Doktor and Moses really flew over my head. It's just a bunch of cultural allusions but I don't see how they connect.
- Herr Doktor is a traditional German title, roughly equivalent to the more-known "Doctor of Medicine (MD)" or "Juris Doctor (JD)".
- Is the allusion to Moses due to this story being post-war/unification and Moses is a Jewish figure? (There might be technicalities between "Jew", "Israelite", and "Abrahamic" but I'm even more ignorant here than I am of German customs.)
- Is "space on the stone tablets", "11th Commandment" an allusion to the (in)famous German noun-phrases? Like "Wohnungsgeberbestatigung" which is actually three words (trans: "apartment-provider's confirmation"/"landlord's confirmation").
It's a humurous statement about arrogance, in a nutshell :
The Doctor is always correct, no matter the context.
The Moses 11th Commandment, is a comment on the biblical story of Moses. He was given 10 laws from God, and etched them onto a stone tablet. The Doctors of Germany are annoyed becuase the there should have beeen an 11th COmmandandment and it should have been, 'The Doctor is always correct'. The Doctors of Germany have forgiven God for this oversight.
I feel like you might be overthinking this a little ;) it's simply that commonly and (mostly) ironically Mose's commands are seen as the corner-stone of Christian societies.
And since the fact that ein Herr Doctor is always right is such a fundamental law in German society (again, this is obviously a hyperbole and meant ironically) one would've expected it to be included in Mose's list of commands. But since it isn't, ehe only rational reason for it to have been omitted must've been the fact that he didn't have much space left for that 11th command. That's all.
To add to the other explanations, there are Herr Doktors that think so high of themselves that they put the title everywhere, business cards, emails addresses, name on the letter box, and everywhere else they are supposed to write the name, you even get to write it on personal data online forms.
Coming from a country (Portugal) where having an Engineering degree still has a similar connotation and there are still some that make the point to be called Eng. SoAndSo, specially on smaller towns and villages, it was kind of ironic to find a society where it is taken to the next level.
In undergraduate -- It was always Professor LastName.
In grad school, other cost, it was Doctor Lastname. We had a discussion there, and learned that in Germany, it was Herr Doctor Professor Lastname.
The old testament says that Moses received the 10 commandements from god and he wrote them down on stone tablets.
The author says that people with a doctor degree are always right. Moses would have written that down as well but he had no space on his stone tablets left.
The idea is that "a Herr Doktor is always right" is a holy commandment in Germany, just as important as the other ten and it should be noted along with the other ten. He's saying the Germans have forgiven Moses by now for leaving it out, but they still consider it as much a holy commandment as the others.
Its a kind of "vm" It has something morally akin to pickle. So checkpoints of prior runstates. It has strengths, basically. I interviewed a really gifted young programmer who'd been working on trafficlight control systems, coded in lisp. Emacs lisp? OK that's.. idiosyncratic, but are we now saying C99 isn't C?
We didn't appoint but, I think she was a brilliant coder and I trust trafficlight systems coded in lisp so why not ATC?
> Its a kind of "vm" It has something morally akin to pickle.
...
Your comments here on HN hardly ever make any sense and they show a complete lack of understanding of both how coordinating conjunctions and punctuation work. They look like some keywords sorta related to the article but pieced together using a Markov chain or something like that.
I'm not a native english speaker but when I post in english I try to make at least semi-coherent sentences and I try to pay attention to punctuation.
Your comments are all so weird that I don't even need to read your username when I stumble upon one of them: I know it's you.
Your answers to people asking you why you are acting so weird also don't make any sense: it's more of the same nonsense.
I don't usually complain much here but it'd be nice if you stopped acting full on crazy.
Basically everything you post is so weird I'm wondering if I'm not talking to a bot and if that bot is not going to spout of the same non-sense in response. And if that's the case, well, I feel like HN would be a better place without that kind of pollution...
It provides a high level framework to run user code and handle IO. Folks that use Emacs or Vi (famously Mutt) to drive their console apps is very similar to how folks use Electron for desktop applications.
TECO on VMS was much less capable compared to MIT TECO, and was IIRC optional and rarely installed.
And while original EMACS was written as TECO macros, the experience of using them was completely different. I could use original EMACS, but TECO would leave me completely lost.
Well Lisp was not in the budget and the responsible person (the Dr. he is talking about) insisted on it. So he gave him what he could, but was not convinced that it was the right choice. If my project lead asks me to solve a problem with unreasonable requirements I will point out the problems but will still do it, in the end it's not my call. But I'm still free to criticize the work.
Found it! Amazon also used to run on Emacs.
> Mailman was the Customer Service customer-email processing application for ... four, five years? A long time, anyway. It was written in Emacs. Everyone loved it.
> People still love it. To this very day, I still have to listen to long stories from our non-technical folks about how much they miss Mailman. I
See more here : https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...
Interesting take on Python there, not sure it's aged well:
> Well, they're just like the Smalltalk folks, who waited forever to replace C++, and then Java came along and screwed them royally, and permanently. Oops. Ruby's doing exactly that to Python, right now, today. Practically overnight.
> Python would have taken over the world, but it has two fatal flaws: the whitespace thing, and the permafrost thing.
Yeah, he was totally wrong on Python.
That being said, I'm not sure he would have predicted that data science would be what pushed Python into a better place. Very few people would have, certainly around 2004 or earlier when he was writing it.
7 replies →
EMACS, a great air traffic controller, but really could do with a good text editor.
> In Germany, a Herr Doktor is always right (they have forgiven Moses by now for not having space on the stone tablets, but it really is the 11th Commandment)
> Pro tip: don't look in the kitchen when governments brew up safety critical systems. I was scared to fly over Germany for a while...
The author has a lovely writing style for this kind of content.
Found the author's blog in the reddit comments: http://evrl.com/
I liked the account but to be honest this line about Herr Doktor and Moses really flew over my head. It's just a bunch of cultural allusions but I don't see how they connect.
- Herr Doktor is a traditional German title, roughly equivalent to the more-known "Doctor of Medicine (MD)" or "Juris Doctor (JD)".
- Is the allusion to Moses due to this story being post-war/unification and Moses is a Jewish figure? (There might be technicalities between "Jew", "Israelite", and "Abrahamic" but I'm even more ignorant here than I am of German customs.)
- Is "space on the stone tablets", "11th Commandment" an allusion to the (in)famous German noun-phrases? Like "Wohnungsgeberbestatigung" which is actually three words (trans: "apartment-provider's confirmation"/"landlord's confirmation").
So...explainer from anyone who got this line?
It's a humurous statement about arrogance, in a nutshell : The Doctor is always correct, no matter the context.
The Moses 11th Commandment, is a comment on the biblical story of Moses. He was given 10 laws from God, and etched them onto a stone tablet. The Doctors of Germany are annoyed becuase the there should have beeen an 11th COmmandandment and it should have been, 'The Doctor is always correct'. The Doctors of Germany have forgiven God for this oversight.
I feel like you might be overthinking this a little ;) it's simply that commonly and (mostly) ironically Mose's commands are seen as the corner-stone of Christian societies.
And since the fact that ein Herr Doctor is always right is such a fundamental law in German society (again, this is obviously a hyperbole and meant ironically) one would've expected it to be included in Mose's list of commands. But since it isn't, ehe only rational reason for it to have been omitted must've been the fact that he didn't have much space left for that 11th command. That's all.
6 replies →
To add to the other explanations, there are Herr Doktors that think so high of themselves that they put the title everywhere, business cards, emails addresses, name on the letter box, and everywhere else they are supposed to write the name, you even get to write it on personal data online forms.
Coming from a country (Portugal) where having an Engineering degree still has a similar connotation and there are still some that make the point to be called Eng. SoAndSo, specially on smaller towns and villages, it was kind of ironic to find a society where it is taken to the next level.
21 replies →
Honorifics are cultural.
In undergraduate -- It was always Professor LastName. In grad school, other cost, it was Doctor Lastname. We had a discussion there, and learned that in Germany, it was Herr Doctor Professor Lastname.
7 replies →
Doktor is also the equivalent of a PhD. He probably had a PhD in CompSciene.
3 replies →
The old testament says that Moses received the 10 commandements from god and he wrote them down on stone tablets.
The author says that people with a doctor degree are always right. Moses would have written that down as well but he had no space on his stone tablets left.
(a) Herr Doktor = the professor (the academic, the PhD guy, the big fish in a goverment organization, the one with the most credentials)
(b) "Herr Doktor is always right" - a central tenet of German society (or basically, organization politics) according to the author.
(c) Such a central tenet that it should have been on Moses tablets as the 11th commandment, but Moses run out of space.
(d) Benevolent as they are, however, the Doktors, forgave Moses for that oversight.
The idea is that "a Herr Doktor is always right" is a holy commandment in Germany, just as important as the other ten and it should be noted along with the other ten. He's saying the Germans have forgiven Moses by now for leaving it out, but they still consider it as much a holy commandment as the others.
You aren’t a Mel Brooks fan? “The lord has given me these fifteen *trip* these ten commandments..”
Are you autistic?
Amusingly, a lot of flight search continues to run on Lisp at Google (QPX).
Its a kind of "vm" It has something morally akin to pickle. So checkpoints of prior runstates. It has strengths, basically. I interviewed a really gifted young programmer who'd been working on trafficlight control systems, coded in lisp. Emacs lisp? OK that's.. idiosyncratic, but are we now saying C99 isn't C?
We didn't appoint but, I think she was a brilliant coder and I trust trafficlight systems coded in lisp so why not ATC?
> Its a kind of "vm" It has something morally akin to pickle.
...
Your comments here on HN hardly ever make any sense and they show a complete lack of understanding of both how coordinating conjunctions and punctuation work. They look like some keywords sorta related to the article but pieced together using a Markov chain or something like that.
I'm not a native english speaker but when I post in english I try to make at least semi-coherent sentences and I try to pay attention to punctuation.
Your comments are all so weird that I don't even need to read your username when I stumble upon one of them: I know it's you.
Your answers to people asking you why you are acting so weird also don't make any sense: it's more of the same nonsense.
I don't usually complain much here but it'd be nice if you stopped acting full on crazy.
Basically everything you post is so weird I'm wondering if I'm not talking to a bot and if that bot is not going to spout of the same non-sense in response. And if that's the case, well, I feel like HN would be a better place without that kind of pollution...
This is probably someone's attempt at training a model on HN comments.
2 replies →
Their comments seem perfectly understandable to me? Take that sentence for example, I read it as:
> Emacs is a kind of VM (it provides a portable runtime environment) and has a serialization/persistence facility similar to Python's "pickle" library
1 reply →
Your answers to people asking you why you are acting so weird also don't make any sense: it's more of the same nonsense.
To this: there is one, one, highly specific instance in the last 24h. Are you referring to this?
I'll have to try harder then.
I think the Caltrain people ran their stuff on emacs too.
https://groups.google.com/g/iphonewebdev/c/s3h8PRyfmDI
Basically an early incarnation of what electron does today, no?
No.
Yes, at a certain abstraction level, Yes!
It provides a high level framework to run user code and handle IO. Folks that use Emacs or Vi (famously Mutt) to drive their console apps is very similar to how folks use Electron for desktop applications.
Surprised the VMS guys just did not already know about emacs as TECO was one of the forbears of emacs I believe.
TECO on VMS was much less capable compared to MIT TECO, and was IIRC optional and rarely installed.
And while original EMACS was written as TECO macros, the experience of using them was completely different. I could use original EMACS, but TECO would leave me completely lost.
Well, at least they didn’t write it in Jovial
So basically he offers someone desperate a very questionable solution to his problem and then later mocks him for using that questionable solution?
Well Lisp was not in the budget and the responsible person (the Dr. he is talking about) insisted on it. So he gave him what he could, but was not convinced that it was the right choice. If my project lead asks me to solve a problem with unreasonable requirements I will point out the problems but will still do it, in the end it's not my call. But I'm still free to criticize the work.