Shamar @Shamar@qoto.org

@mmu_man

Try with https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/ 😄

@novimatrem

@ekaitz_zarraga What I have in mind would be a function that take a string and return an AST. And then functions to traverse/validate/pattern match such AST.

It would not need a whole Turing complete language (and thus it should NOT be so), but could be more readable than --with-this=that -xcfs or the like.

AND the shell could do interesting things with the AST before passing to the command.

@ekaitz_zarraga Said this way, I can stop #Jehanne and redirect the home page to #Oberon! 😄

@ekaitz_zarraga

Probably Wirth was far ahead of... OUR times.

@ekaitz_zarraga technically speaking, that's true for any operating system (it is at least for #Jehanne and #Plan9): the program image of a program is cached so that already faulted page won't be load twice (unless there's high memory pressure and images are discarded).

This is a plain advantage of actual binaries over interpreted stuff, I think. And actually it's not easy to achieve outside kernel without an always running virtual machine.

@ekaitz_zarraga I mean: what if instead of "argc" and "argv" you had "length" and "program" where program was just a string to be interpreted in your specific (but very simple and conventional) language?

What if the shell could apply macro to commands' "programs" before calling exec()?

And what if the syntax was both homoiconic and pythonic?

Yes... I should sleep more... but it sounds VERY interesting in my head.

At times I wonder if command line arguments are half thought surrogates for a small interpreter in the standard library.

I wonder how life would be if every single command would implement his own mini language and exec() would take a string to be interpreted instead of an array of... arguments.

Such interpreter would likely be a sort of lisp (but veeery minimal..), and probably so would be the shell (but a bit more powerful).

Such approach would have interesting impacts on command line programs and general terminal UX.

I would not expect much fuss for such change kernel side.

I wonder if anybody else explored such approach (except on Lisp Machines, obviously)

@mcp_ https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/106059135517585621

Very interesting perspective, @shusha.

I think that looking at the #FreeSoftware Manifest as a feminist document is a slightly projective of your own culture, but your criticism is very clever and I think that @ondiz and @mcp_ might like it a lot.

In fact, I think that #RMS missed the point of Free Software (🤦‍♂️ 🤷‍♂️ ), but not because of his condition (and btw it's well known he is autistic since he was a kid) but because of the influence of his mother-culture: he grown up in the USA in the middle of Cold War.

So he slightly misinterpreted the nascent #hacker movement (and his misunderstanding got spread in a powerful global feedback loop).

He founded Free Software on the value of #freedom instead of the value of #curiosity, which is in fact more fundamental: the reason while freedom alone is not enough, and you need #communion (protection from enclosures) and #candour (honest sharing of one's perspective).

Hackers are ALL about acquiring more knowledge.
A sort of modern #philosophers... but more hungry.
As such we NEED to share what we learn or create, so that other can build on top of it, and teach us what they learn in exchange.
And OBVIOUSLY, you need freedom to explore and hack (even because, it's since Icarus that people of power are scared by hackers http://www.tesio.it/2020/09/03/not_all_hackers_are_americans.html )

Hackers are weird but they are not born weird: we become weird (one way or another) because we are too curious and we slowly move outside the mainstream.

But the reason we do so, is not because we are evil, just because we want to learn more, more deeply, we struggle for (some kind of) knowledge, we care about aspects most people do not give a shit and so on.

Thus, by design, we are interested in EVERY perspective we do not have access to, the farthest from the mainstream, the better.

That's why an autistic like Stallman might feel at home.
And why no hacker would attack other people for what they think or say (as long as they do not lie), just for what they do.
More likely, we are going to engage in endless debates, trying to understand the others' perspective and trying to explain the other our own, different, perspective on the matter (something that to non-hackers looks like people trying to outsmart each other, while we are just trying to understand in a very direct and effective communication protocol).

But you are very correct on this: "it is all about protecting a social practice (of programming). But the solution it takes, in form of the GPL, is acting on the level of the product of that social practice, not the social practice itself"

I think I could not explain it better than this.

In fact, one of the limit of #GPL (and any other #copyleft I know) is that it only protects the software artefact, NOT the hacking community.

Even with a strong copyleft, there are way to NOT give back to the community the knowledge they ought to obtain (think of the cloud and software as a service).

Also, the Free Software movement never cared about EXTENDING the hacking community (in part, due to the elitism and focus on product and meritocracy that #ESR spread thanks to O'Reilly, that poisoned what was not elitist at all)

Indeed another criticism I have over Stallman is that he didn't focus on teaching people how to program and kept Free Software simple enough to be readable for everybody.

So this is something that, IMO, we should fix in Free Software.

And for sure, this is NOT the direction that corporations want the Free Software to take.

@tanakian@ծմակուտ.հայ

Out of curiosity, in your opinion and experience, what are the advantages of Oberon-2 over Oberon-07?

(I don't think it's a matter of worth: that page explicitly states that "It does not document variants, e.g. Component Pascal, Oberon-2, unless those are treated as extensions", that in fact looks reasonable to reduce confusion, given the site name...)

@dthompson

Yeah, #softwarefreedomconservancy.

Donate to them if you want that #Google employees can safely violate #GPL: https://medium.com/@giacomo_59737/what-i-wish-i-knew-before-contributing-to-open-source-dd63acd20696