No, no, no. No problem with your opinion. You can love Apple if you want. I just struggle to understand how you and others can see Apple in the light that you do, and be blinded to all else. I mean, the value to me is the data and the fact it's online. The database itself. I have my own systems for manipulating the data the way I want it (I would think most HN nerds would have similar skills, but maybe not). That's just me. Others seem to love things because they are produced by some popular company. And for no other reason. I just can't really understand it. These are computers produced in Chinese factories. Getting cheaper everyday. Data can be visualised in myriad ways.
It is futile. There are so many examples of programmers just doing mindlessly stupid things, often because "everyone else is doing it" or they read some "howto" they found somewhere, or they are using some library written by someone else.
How many times do you think people use extended regular expressions and backtracking when it's entirely unnecessary? They often have no idea that there is even a simpler way that will work (in some cases it might be faster). They think more complexity is actually making things "easier". Must have PCRE. Why? "Because I can't get basic regex to do what I want."
Let 'em enjoy their complex regex. Until there's a problem and they have to try to decipher what they heck it's actually doing.
PEG is fine. Lua has a good PEG library.
Still, a good handle on basic regex will take you a long way.
Your example is quite telling. Catting a file may be 'useless' in a pure functional sense, but the command has extremely small overhead and aids readability, as you can read the input/output flow from left to right. This is consistent with the rest of the pipeline.
It's also easier to change the first command in the pipeline without having to step over the input argument, again more consistent with the rest of the pipeline.
To avoid the cat, one can write
< file program1 | program2
but in practice, cat adds no noticeable overhead.
As for regexes, I personally find using POSIX regular expressions to be a bit like using vi after becoming familiar with vim. You can get by, but it's crap and there's a reason why people came up with something better. Of course, using complicated features of any language or toolkit without understanding how they work is dumb, but that's not a reason to go back to the 1980s.
I agree with your first paragraph. Science is based on consensus. You have to convince your peers you are "right". But what makes science worthy of being taken seriously is that it follows a defined procedural method of doing the convincing; and most everyone involved in science accepts that general method as being a sound one. People can actually agree on things because we all follow the same general method of arriving at conclusions. And... this works across a variety of disciplines.
Does maths use the scientific method to answer questions? Do the questions maths can answer concern areas outside of just maths? Is maths something that is used _within_ the scientific method to answer questions, in a variety of different disciplines?
It's a lot easier to approach and attempt to answer questions (get consensus) when you have a generally accepted method for doing so. It seems like maths entusiasists, e.g. the kind who love computers, can take widely different approaches to answering the types of wide-ranging questions addressed in the sciences. They may even disregard the scientific method altogether.
If Usenet/WWW is any indication I'm guessing this leads to a lot of disagreement between maths devotees if the topic at hand is anything but pure maths and logic.
Not taking anything away from people who love maths. In fact, one of the major problems in the sciences is the lack of mathematical rigor by far too many scientists when analysing results.
tl;dr Scientific method + maths = good. Need both for solid analysis and reasoning.
Vimeo is a pain though. It does not work well without Flash, as does YouTube. player.vimeo.com/config/12345678.smil will give some mp4 url's but they require the request to come from their swf or some other annoying impediment. Not everyone always has a super fast connection or uses Flash all the time. With YouTube that's not a problem. With Vimeo, it is.
