Am I correct in thinking that instead of symlinking .bashrc, etc. to new_bashrc.sh, you could simply have them 'source new_bashrc.sh'? This would also mean you could keep all your dotfiles in a git repository without worrying about the symlinks.
Just for interest, this still can be done with unique keys: Officer Alice handcuffs prisoner and wants to hand off to Officer Bob. Officer Bob locks prisoner with his own handcuffs (prisoner is now wearing two pairs), then Officer Alice removes hers.
I hope I'm not the only one who finds this article poorly written; I got a better understanding from the list of bullet points on the slide than I did trying to follow the rambling paragraphs below them.
A better reason to replace lists with trees might be for parallel execution. I enjoyed this talk by Guy Steele on replacing lists with trees in Fortress:
http://vimeo.com/6624203
If you leave aside the fact that they're talking about Pointcast, the article gets a lot of things right in terms of what is now possible with RSS feeds, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, NetFlix, Hulu...
You could do worse than Lua if you're going that route - it's small, clean, and fast, designed for embedding and you can move smoothly from simple config files to complex scripted behaviour.
"What is required is the wholesale adoption of the standards applied in the pharmaceutical industry drug trials: double blind trials (aka peer reviewing)"
I think the gentleman who authored this article neglected to look up the terms in question.
- Aardappel (visual functional programming) [1] - Widget Workshop (something like a cross between The Incredible Machine and visual programming) [2]
[1] http://strlen.com/aardappel-language [2] http://www.old-games.com/download/3399/widget-workshop