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'GOTO considered harmful' is practically biblical law amongst many programmers, but it's worth remembering that he made that statement in the context of an argument with Donald Knuth. Knuth won: ( http://web.archive.org/web/20070927094626/http://pplab.snu.a... See also http://web.archive.org/web/20051128093253/http://kerneltrap.... about goto

Good uses of goto are very rare with current programming languages. The only cases where I have found good uses were with languages that did not have exception handling and in each cases, there was some deficiencies in the specifications and the code containing the goto has disappeared with the corrected specifications. Maybe this was luck.

I still think it is ridiculous to hate goto.

Why use www? 12 years ago

Do the redirect always the other way. People understand when the www appears that you have done something to help them.

An Awk Primer 12 years ago

I think there is no use to master bash, sed and awk. When you have a task that becomes tricky (beyond entry level) in sed, it is often easy in awk. When you have a task that becomes tricky in bash or awk, switch to a more powerful scripting language like perl/python/ruby/?. I love perl, but I feel it is getting outdated. I try to improve my programming speed in python but I am still far from my speed in perl.

I love the slide where plan9 is compared to Linux (37 syscalls, 148,787 lines of code).

For me, the missing tools would be a good up to date browser (google chrome or firefox) and something like virtualbox for virtual machines. I think the browser can not work correctly without good video drivers. Libre Office would be a bonus.

How Apple Cheats 12 years ago

Please, do not joke about my english. This article is about the iphone that has features that are blocked by Apple. If you own the phone, you remove the block and use the feature. Take the example of a car where there would be a huge stone on the middle back sit. You can not use the middle back sit without removing the stone, but the seller of the car prohibits to remove the stone.

How Apple Cheats 12 years ago

I agree that stuff like this is expected but I am still shocked. I think that this kind of revelations means you never really own the iphone you have bought. It is more like a leasing. The only way to own what you buy is to switch to open alternatives.

I like very much this introduction to git. Most of the other tutorials considers git as a magic black box. Here, it explains what is performed internally by most of the commands, without going into tiny useless details. This is probably not a good tutorial for build management processes and not enough to rewrite git, but it fits perfectly well my "hacker" mind. Thank you very much.

RIM should have sticked to keyboard based phones and use their energy on developping the application market. I do not disagree with you, but I think they could not develop their application market because all their energy was devoted to their paradigm change.

Mayer seems to view Yahoo primarily as a place where you can find all sorts of stuff on one giant app. “Once the user’s in that app experience, the easiest thing to do is stay in that app experience,”.

I think this is a very insightful analysis. I think there are people that like the "yahoo" way of presenting applications. It may look old fashion to others, but there is a market. If it was not the case, yahoo would already be dead. If yahoo changes its mind to do the same as others, they would lose their soul and die. We have similar experience with RIM that left professional phones with keyboard to become an Apple follower. RIM is (almost) dead.

I think that becoming an Apple follower was the misstep of RIM. RIM was the leader on the market of professional phones with keyboard. I am a geek, I need a phone with good keyboard and good battery life (big touch screens have a negative impact on battery).

At that time, the main idea of OO was binding data and operations. Ada 83 does not provide polymorphism, nor inheritance, but provides many levels of encapsulation: package, generic package, generic types. Since Ada 95, child packages and tagged types (object with polymorphism and inheritance) have been added.

Even in Ada 2005, the general advice given to Ada developers is to use objects only when they need polymorphism. Ada is a marvellous language that is far richer than just objects and classes.