C-u M-! does the exact same thing in Emacs.

But that goes back to the original point they made, everything outside of the actual text editing and you're in EMACS land with all of it's controls. Even with something as complete as spacemacs, the default landing page when you open it has different key bindings.

This is moronic reasoning. Just because stocks are "cheap" relative to bonds right now does not make stocks an "attractive" investment. As Buffet says, never confuse price with value.

For the people that haven't noticed, a global pandemic and lockdowns killed 40% of small businesses this year, forced many large businesses to take on new debts that will blunt future profits, and forced the government into unprecedented deficits. Stocks are "cheap" because risk went up.

Why not say "Every ~~Forth~~ program is its own DSL for accomplishing its work."? For moderately complicated programs in any language you choose, it can take a long time to grok how the literal code relates to solving the conceptual problem. No language can build in every abstraction, and no programmer has time to learn them all.

I think you are close to part of an answer, but it isn't because Forth and Lisp expect one to do more work than other languages. If anything, they expect one to do less. The problem is programmers feel lost because there is no way to differentiate the bedrock of the language from higher abstractions. C has operators and statements and keywords that tell you there is nothing "underneath" what you are looking at. With Forth, everything is words. With Lisp, everything is lists.

To be fair, it is very common for Forth programmers to redefine the interpreter as they go. You literally change the language in your program. That's a very different expectation for other kinds of languages.

> You literally change the language in your program. That's a very different expectation for other kinds of languages.

I wonder about that. A few weeks back I read about a coroutines implementation in C, using plain C and lots of intricate preprocessor definitions:

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html

There are similar examples in just about any language out there. People use whatever tools the language ecosystem provides to change the language to fit some problems better. Some languages are easier to change and extend, some are harder, but that doesn't stop people from trying to do this anyway.

I think there's a level of familiarity with the language above which changing it is a natural thing to do. It can take years before you learn a "normal" language well enough to be able to do this, but with Forth, Scheme, Prolog, and the like, you're basically required to do this from the get-go. My intuition is that these languages simply target advanced, already experienced programmers, while completely ignoring the beginners. So it's more of the optimization for a different user-base, IMO. That would also explain how these languages are still alive, despite their communities being very small for the last 50 years.

Written text IS a visual medium. It works because there is a finite alphabet of characters that can be combined into millions of words. Any other "visual" language needs a similar structure of primitives to be unambiguously interpreted.

You say visual programming seems to unlock a ton of value. What can you do with a visual language that is much easier than text? Difficult concepts might be easier to understand once there is visual representation, but that does not imply creating the visual representation is easier. And why should pictures be more approachable than text? People might understand pictures before they can read, but we still teach everyone to read.

The term “visual programming“ generally refers to spatial diagrams (usually 2D, but 3D especially for 3D subject matter).

Think coordinates, graphs, nodes, edges, flows, and nested diagrams.

“Visual” is especially meaningful in that many relationships are shown explicitly with connected lines or other means.

So yes, for many things a diagram, tree or table structure actually layer out in 2-dimensions to match what it represents is easier to understand.

Surely you appreciate diagrams in educational material despite the text. Surely you have drawn graphs or other kinds of diagrams when you need to visualize (spatially) relationships between parts of something you are designing?

If not, you just have a different style of thinking than many other people.

That contrasts with text code where connections are primarily discovered by proximity of code or common symbols.

Of course text is visual in that it’s a visible representation.

Spreadsheets are a good example of a combination of text “code” embedded in a visual table representation.

How much of the increase in median job tenure is explained by an aging population?

Just because some Linux users do that does not mean it is a requirement. If it were, Linux could never have achieved server the server dominance it has. Fiddling is a side effect of Linux being too flexible, so you always have the nagging feeling you could be better with a different distro/window manager/shell/editor/file manager.

I installed Linux Mint on my parents' computer and it's been running rock solid for three years. And they appreciate not being tricked into updates they don't want.

What annoys me most about this kind of position that I haven't seen addressed enough is the assumption that politics is some kind of grocery basket of personal taste where positions on issues are all independent opinions.

Anyone who thinks about politics seriously and argues politics with people needs to base their opinions on something besides personal preference. This means trying to develop moral and logical principles and goals on which to base positions. When people do this, opinions on many topics will be highly correlated.

I liked this article because I enjoy reading about data structures that can be used in places where the "obvious" implementation is a list of lists. A lists of lists data structure is general enough for many applications and readily available in many languages, but when using it, I often get the sense that I am spinning wheels writing far more code than necessary to do the desired manipulations. It makes me happy to read about more novel solutions.

While their current focus does seem and probably should be on politics due to the wide reach of that topic, I think the idea of perspectives in general is a great idea for such an encyclopedia. The problem, in my view, that leads to the culture of deletionism at Wikipedia is the inability for one article to coherently explore all aspects and interpretations of a topic, so editors start deleting all but the parts they care about. Facts that are relevant to one perspective are not relevant to another. For example, Jesus-the-historical-figure is a different topic from Jesus-the-religous-figure.

I think the way Infogalactic solves the problem it is trying to solve is that people no longer have to argue if a particular fact is worth including in an article and have an edit war. It opens up a third option of recognizing that including or not depends on the circumstances of what the reader is looking for. I'm not sure what potential new problems you are thinking of.

As for corporate sponsors, they are bound by the same rules as the rest. I don't think explicitly recognizing corporate interest in the topic would be worse than trying to have an objective page which would probably be subverted anyway.

As for terminology, I don't see how "Infogalactic" as a name is more confusing to new users than "Wikipedia". Most people didn't know what "wiki" meant before Wikipedia. And I don't think new contributors would really have a problem figuring out "Galaxians" and "Starlords" with the obvious context.

I find this sort of answer unsatisfyingly incomplete.

All the examples of people who profit off fear: mass media, lawyers, politicians, and industrial pharmaceuticals have all existed for decades longer than the current age of fear. That makes them insufficient as a cause. There must be something else.

Internet is the great amplifier - if you are interested, you know about many more horrible things going on, unfairness, stupid laws that destroy lives, being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

And that is western world. Look elsewhere, you can find tons of inescapable unfair misery (150 million dalits in india, anyone?).

Add peer pressure, instant seeing of highlights of other's lives which makes some depressed.

The development of behavioural science (i.e. not modelling people as rational beings, but exploiting human psychological biases, see R. Cialdini, D. Ariely, D. Kahneman) is a new phenomenon.

Also is the shift from mass broadcasting to targeted messaging. The degree of information available to exploit you, your weaknesses and biases is a new phenomenon.

The erosion of social loyalties and ties, which can be linked to one century of neoliberal policies, is also a change (although it happened in the past: see the Corruption and decline of Rome: http://www.historytoday.com/stephen-williams/corruption-and-...)

Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist, sociologist, psychologist or any other -ist, so I'm not saying this from a quantitative place. This comes from a place of observation on my part. Take it for what it is.

I think fear is a natural human attribute left over from an earlier time in human existence, I really do.

From a young age, if we're lucky enough to have parents, we flock to them because we perceive that the monster under the bed will get us.

In our teenage years, we fear the next steps of our lives and I'd dare say that even the most introverted kid wants to fit in.

In our twenties, we fear being successful or not.

These are gross oversimplifications, but I think the point is illustrated. I think there are two parts to this fear thing. I think we humans are naturally fearful due to thousands of years of biology, and I think we look to leaders out of fear, there's certainly enough evidence of this if you just look at society as a whole and how we behave. Time and time again, societies throughout history look to leaders to placate our fears. The Stanley Milgram experiments touch on this too.

Now for what I perceive to be the dark part of this whole thing. Our leaders have learned that we can be controlled through fear. I say learned, but I possibly mean that this is biological too. If you look back throughout societies, all great societies either were, or eventually became autocratic. We live for someone else to make the scary monsters go away.

Sadly, I think we need fear. Have a look at the Universe 25 experiments to see what happens when a society has all needs met. Spoiler: It appears to end in death and mentally ill behavior.

> I think fear is a natural human attribute left over from an earlier time in human existence, I really do.

It's not a leftover, it's a survival mechanism. If fear were stripped away from a person or a society, it wouldn't last long. It's easy to think that rational thought would keep people from dancing on the edge of a cliff but rationality can be undermined through persuasion, self-delusion, and lack of conscious attention. The limbic system evolved as a attempt to keep us safe prior to logical thought and it still does the job.

Fair enough, these are good points. I didn't state it but what comes to mind for me is that surviving isn't nearly as hard from a physical perspective (At least not in the U.S.), but I think our fear has been replaced. We no longer need to kill a wildebeest by hand to get its food, but we do have to maintain a job to get food.

Universe 25 did not have all its needs met: it was chronically overcrowded. That was the whole point of Calhoun's experiments.

Thank you for the info, I missed that part.

Maybe we as a society are overcrowded?