I find it interesting that a lot of prominent and respected programmers (jwz, Linus, Dan Bernstein, Theo De Raadt) write in this negative and caustic way, and not only is it considered socially acceptable but these rants get linked to and give the writer even wider street cred.<p>I think this is a detriment to our community, and I say this as a reformed (or at least reforming) flamer who used to take after that style. Actually I think one of the most positive things about participating in the HN community is that toxic commenting is not rewarded nearly to the extent that it is on other forums. It's taught me to be more civil.<p>I've interacted with enough top programmers who are always nice to know that flaming isn't a prerequisite to getting your point across. Besides many excellent HN commenters, I think of John Resig, Shawn Hargreaves, Sanjay Ghemawat. I strive to be more like them, and less like the people who are known for their flames.
Very cool: <a href="http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-new-and-stupid/#comment-1048" rel="nofollow">http://www.jwz.org/blog/2010/10/every-day-i-learn-something-...</a><p>>> "Ten days to implement the lexer, parser, bytecode emitter (which I folded into the parser; required some code buffering to reorder things like the for(;;) loop head parts and body), interpreter, built-in classes, and decompiler. I had help only for jsdate.c, from Ken Smith of Netscape (who, per our over-optimistic agreement, cloned java.util.Date — Y2K bugs and all! Gosling…).<p>>> Sorry, not enough time for me to analyze tail position (using an attribute grammar approach: <a href="http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_calls" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_...</a>). Ten days without much sleep to build JS from scratch, "make it look like Java" (I made it look like C), and smuggle in its saving graces: first class functions (closures came later but were part of the plan), Self-ish prototypes (one per instance, not many as in Self).<p>>> I'll do better in the next life."
> I'm still bummed that I failed to talk you in to making #!/usr/bin/javascript work back then, because I think that we were still in the window where we had a shot at smothering Perl in the crib…<p>It's like catching a beautiful glimpse of a future that never was.<p>(I might update the last three words of that sentence if I take the time to fiddle around with Node.)
Wasn't this one of the things that broke a whole bunch of twitter apps a while ago? And the reason the twitter API returns post ids as both integers _and strings_ in it's json?<p>(at least in Fortran you knew the variable "i" was a properly specified integer, dammit!)