TheoLib

Comments are "reached for rarely and last". Whatever shortcomings comments have pale in comparison to being faced with and trying to figure out undocumented or too sparsely commented code, which, in my long experience, has been an order of magnitude more prevalent than sufficiently documented/readable code. Heck, even a wrong comment is sometimes preferable to no comment if it at least gives me a clue as to what the purpose of that section of code was at some point in its evolution.

Although some geniuses have mental disorders, don't make the mistake of thinking that all people with mental disorders are geniuses or have special insights - we're just run-of-the-mill people that run the gamut of abilities and personalities. And "happy" is not the right word to use for depression. As Peter Kramer said in his book, AGAINST DEPRESSION, the opposite of depression is not happiness, but resilience. If you suffer from true clinical depression, you can appreciate this distinction.

A number of programming languages allow an arbitrary range of indices for an array, including Ada, Fortran 77, and Pascal. See the "Specifiable Base Index" column in this table at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_langu...

I was a long-time Tcl user and loved it. [incr Tcl], incidentally, is not a play on "+=1", but "++"; i.e., [incr Tcl] is to Tcl as C++ is to C. Speaking of event loops, before Tcl had its own event loop, I wrote a select()-based event loop extension to Tcl that was similar to the Xt event loop. For that, I was (or still am for all I know) listed as an extension contributor in the Tcl/Tk FAQs.

[incr Tcl] was a great OO framework for writing GUIs. Perhaps not the greatest framework since it was trying to mimic C++.

As antirez said, "It's like learning Scheme or FORTH: mind changing."

Have you ever read a technical article by Donald Knuth? He is not brief; he writes engagingly about low-level details. David's posting was just fine, in fact great. The posting was not that long and you could pick up the gist of it in the first few paragraphs.

Why is UTF-8 not an encoding for Unicode?

From the Unicode website (http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#UTF8): "UTF-8 is the byte-oriented encoding form of Unicode."

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8): "UTF-8 (UCS Transformation Format — 8-bit[1]) is a variable-width encoding that can represent every character in the Unicode character set."

I read a couple of papers on the backlash (even by expert economists) against the heavy emphasis on mathematics in economics, which, IIRC from the papers, began back in the 1940s. Basically, economists work hard producing mathematically coherent models that aren't applicable to the real world.

UCSD Pascal compiled to p-code. Other Pascals compiled to native code. The Wikipedia entry for Turbo Pascal indeed mentions that the TP-generated executables were extremely fast, which was a revelation to UCSD users.

Early in my programming career, my team leader took me aside and explained how to write an effective and persuasive memo that would get through to management. It was valuable advice as the rant I had written got nowhere. And management is not the only target audience with short attention spans; same-level colleagues have been equally challenged by having to read an E-mail longer than 1 paragraph, even when it concerns technical details of the project they're working on. Consequently, I dumb down E-mails in an effort to get the attention of as many of the recipients as I can. Condescending? No. Realistic? Yes. (Given my druthers, I'm normally prone to writing Yegge-length E-mails and memos; I've just learned that less is better when trying to through to the most people.)

> What language do you think was perfect at it's first release?

Algol 60.

Worked fine for me in Opera under Windows XP, although I got bored with the presentation by the time I got into the 120's pages and quit.

>> Still fun for me, after ~15 years of coding, 5 of them professionally.

Lots of us did coding as a hobby for 10 years before gettting out into the professional world. With 5 years under your belt, you're still a junior programmer and the world's your oyster. Let us know how much fun it is 15-20 years or more from now. (And when you do have to care about things more important than programming: family, health, aging parents, job security, etc., etc.)