> "Simply beautiful", "Distraction-free computing", "Everything at your fingertips", "completely redesigned for GNOME 3", "And much, much more", ...
This page reads much like a corporate ad.
> "GNOME 3 is crammed full of new features."
Is that a good thing?
For Gnome, I want: more streamlining, compartmentalization, removal of deprecated features, and optimization. Make it smaller and tighter -- only add parts conservatively and if they offer great value.
> And the only way you can ever know which one you'll like best is to live there and go native.
Would be nice if we could learn from others' experiences to help us make a better decision right off the bat, rather than moving all over the world to try and experience everything first hand.
This discussion seems to focus on the plain spartan Scheme standard, when -- comparing to CL -- it should focus on an implementation that contains standard-ish libraries as well.
Although CL might be the whole well-stocked golf bag (1-wood, 2-wood, irons, wedges, putters, ball-cleaner, radio...), wouldn't, say, Chicken be a smaller but still fairly well-rounded set?
Would be useful if, in chapter 1, section "Lisp is a huge language", the author mentioned approx how many pages of CLtL is devoted specifically to the core of the Language. Comparison to the size of Scheme would be helpful as well (one regularly hears that the size of the entire Scheme R5RS spec is smaller than the index of the CL book).
> ... but no-one can give me any logical reason why this is the case.
If you search the c.l.s archives, you can find the various reasons.
> I wish Scheme implementors would stop dragging their feet and implement R6RS already!
My limited understanding of the situation is as follows:
R6RS made it through the standards process even though a substantial number of implementors and practitioners weren't happy with it. Many refused to implement R6RS, or else ignored it, but some big players did implement it. After that, it was a stalemate for a while, with the community divided.
Then the current steering committee decided that this rift needed to be repaired. I think they saw that some Schemers wanted to keep Scheme small, while others wanted it to be more practical and include more "batteries". Read more about their conclusions and plans at http://www.scheme-reports.org/ (strangely (or perhaps not so strangely?), I can't find a link to that site from schemers.org)...
The long and the short of it is, to reunite the community, the steering committee decided to define Scheme (R7RS) as a small core language ("wg1") + a superset of features/libraries that most people are using in one way or another anyway ("wg2"). If an implementor only wants to implement wg1, then that's fine, and it's mostly like R5RS anyway. If they want to provide a full-featured batteries-included implementation, then they implement wg1 + wg2 (which will take the best and least controversial features from R6RS and probably also draw heavily from the SRFI's). This satisfies both the "keep it small!" faction and the "we want more practical stuff included!" faction.
As we speak, the R7RS wg1 and wg2 groups are working out the kinks for their respective proposals / public reports, with votes and discussions actively taking place. I think R7RS is going to have broad support and be rapidly adopted.
BeOS was amazing. It simply smoked the competition. It was sleek, functional, good-looking, fun to program for, and had blistering speed (remember it playing 6 different videos each on a side of a rotating cube?).
It was not free software, but with features like that, who cared, right?
Well, its community cared when BeOS was mutated into an "appliance OS" and then later sold off and closed down.
I'm not optimistic about Haiku. As soon as it becomes popular (and I don't see why it wouldn't -- it's aimed squarely at knocking the socks off of end-users), I bet all the core devs get scooped up by some company which will then add proprietary lock-in features and sell it to users.
It actually makes very little sense for men to get married (in the USA, anyway) these days. It's simply far too easy for women to
1. become "unhappy",
2. get a no-fault divorce,
3. be awarded primary custody of the kids (this happens somewhere around 80% of the time),
4. take the house, and
5. be awarded large child-support and alimony payments.
In the USA, somewhere around half of marriages end in divorce. There is evidence [1] that, among college-educated couples, the percentage of divorces initiated by women is approximately 90%. Many men are blindsided by them.
Very few things in life can be worse for a man than having his kids taken away by a woman with the help of the family courts system. One day you're reading with them on the couch every night, the next you're seeing them only every other weekend. Devastating.
I know, I know. Your girl isn't like that. Well, women change when the kids are born and the real work begins.
This article skips a very important aspect of these subjects: can they choose a topic and learn it inside and out and not forget it? For example, if they were interested in, say, botany, could they use their fantastic memory to remember detailed characteristics of every plant species they study?
All they seem to remember is what the did on a given day, or who won a sporting event or the weather.
This page reads much like a corporate ad.
> "GNOME 3 is crammed full of new features."
Is that a good thing?
For Gnome, I want: more streamlining, compartmentalization, removal of deprecated features, and optimization. Make it smaller and tighter -- only add parts conservatively and if they offer great value.