bitcrafter

You are making the extremely incorrect presumption that I am unfamiliar with Lisp and how macros work. What is unclear to me is how you specifically think that arbitrarily rewriting code at macro expansion time is exactly equivalent to arbitrarily manipulating the stack at runtime.

Yeah, there is nothing more annoying in general when starting to type text into a co-workers desktop than having random letters show up rather than having the cursor move around.

nano -> vim

This one is extremely consistent with the others because once you have made the switch, it becomes harder to escape.

AT&T, for example, once aimed to cut the ratio of managers to nonmanagers in one of its units from 1:5 to 1:30.

Wow, it is never a great idea to give someone more than about 5 direct reports if you want them to be effective.

Perhaps you could explain exactly what you mean?

In Forth, though, the number of results pushed to the stack after an execution of a word could be a function of the input rather than a single value or even a fixed number of values.

Likewise, the number of arguments that a word pops from the stack could be a function of a value pushed earlier to the stack.

No. Roughly speaking, functional languages implicitly manage the stack for you, whereas Forth requires you to manage it explicitly.

1. Develop your project on a temporary filesystem until it has the desired functionality.
2. Move the compiled binary to a persistent filesystem.
3. Reboot.

The difference is that, in World War 2, Germany was reduced to rubble and a significant fraction of its population was killed off because of the direction that its society took. This forced it to take a really long and hard look at itself and figure out what it could do to make sure that this never happened again.

By contrast, the U.S. has never been put in an equivalent position. The bloodiest war in our history was actually the U.S. Civil War in the 1860's over slavery (and some other things, but mostly slavery). Although the anti-slavery North in that war won and was able to successfully end slavery in the entire country, racism itself was a whole separate issue, and (simplifying the history a bit) it continued to exist formally as a less extreme government-backed institution until the mid-20th century. (An example of this were the "separate but equal" schools that segregated black children from white children and were very much not equal.)

Of course, this only changed the law of the land, not hearts and minds. Education is very local, so there is no central authority which makes decisions about these things, and people regardless have the option of sending their children to private (often religious) schools, or even to home-school them. Furthermore, unlike many countries, we take freedom of belief extremely seriously, and additionally we extend this to a near-absolute freedom for parents to teach whatever things they want to their children to believe. The U.S. stance is essentially that we might not like the values that our neighbor is teaching our children, but we like the idea of the government telling us what values we are required to teach to our children even less, and this is essentially because our country was founded on a fundamental distrust of government and this general attitude has propagated down the generations.

So, what would it take for the entire country--and remember that this is a huge and incredibly diverse country--to get together and decide that we really need to, collectively, put aside our own individual opinions of what our values should be and what we should be teaching our children and refashion our entire society around a new collectively held set of values? That is asking a lot of people, so probably the most likely way that would get done is if fascism takes over our country and drives us to start a war that results in the entire country being reduced to rubble and a significant fraction of our population being killed off. This would force us to really take a long and hard look at ourselves and figure out what we could do to make sure that this never happened again.

(Except that now that nuclear weapons exist, "rubble" takes on a new meaning, so that rebuilding part may not get a chance to happen...)

That's completely fair. I personally really like the site because it feels like being part of a creative community, but that also makes the selection of games that are available more eclectic.

I cannot think of a better use of the limited resources of our legal system!

So in short, they do not suck so much as blow?