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Being an old VMS fan, I always liked DD-MMM-YYYY (e.g. 29-Jul-2011). At least it eliminates the month day ambiguity which sometimes confuses me.


But then you lose most of the advantages mentioned in the linked summary.


Readability increases but sortability decreases with ddmmyy as opposed to yymmdd.

Readability increases. Dates we use in day-to-day work are probably power-law distributed going backwards with more recent dates being more common. That means if most of the dates will have year 2011, we can guess that, and the day and month become more important. And if most of the months will be current or previous month, we can guess that too and day emerges as the most important piece of info- we will want to read that first. The yymmdd is less readable because it gives us information we (probably, given the power-law distribution mentioned above) already know first, such as the year.

But you lose sortability, yeah.


Dijkstra (in 1975) strongly dislikes FORTRAN, BASIC, APL, PL/I, and COBOL. What languages did he like? Pascal?


Lisp. Dijkstra was the original Smug Lisp Weenie.

> Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.


LISP's syntax is so atrocious that I never understood its popularity. LISP's possibility to introduce higher-order functions was mentioned several times in its defence, but now I come to think of it, that could be done in ALGOL60 as well. My current guess is that LISP's popularity in the USA is related to FORTRAN's shortcomings.

Source: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD07xx/EW...

The memo you're quoting[1] is a lot milder about Lisp, but doesn't come across as the ramblings of a "Smug Lisp Weenie" (disclaimer: I'm currently having a lot of fun playing around with Clojure, so I might not be entirely objective).

[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EW...


I see he favored ALGOL-60, so maybe Pascal, Modula, Ada ...


Pretty sure he was on record against Ada. From his point of view, I don't think Pascal and Modula(-2) had much to recommend them over Algol-60.


Sorry, I see a lot of people don't care for Dvorak, I probably should have put his name in the title. I do think he occasionally has something interesting to say. Simple, clean, fast is why I've used Google and I think that is primarily what has made them a success. If they complicate their applications, will that be a detriment to their business? That's an important question.


I don't know if it will bring on ruin, but I certainly found the old image search much more friendly and usable. Both this and page preview seems like "another useless feature that someone thinks improves the experience when it does nothing but show off the fact that someone can code JavaScript or some other display manipulation language." Clean and fast wins the day with me ... Duck Duck Go?


this. the "improved" image search is terrible. very finicky and even hard to use--hardly simple.

re: ddg. regular user, but as others have pointed out already the ajax load for results is annoying (because it's slow and flashy/jerky).


Note we now have html (non-js) & lite versions at http://duckduckgo.com/html & http://duckduckgo.com/lite


excellent, just appended '/html' to the default browser search engine url.

would be great if instead of having to use specific urls that this could be set up as a preference in settings. still, i'm a happy camper :)


If you hit the front page without JS enabled it will automatically submit to the html version. And similarly, if you hit it with a textmode browser it will automatically go to the lite version.


I like the new one for the most part. Sometimes I would prefer the sizes to be listed under the image, but having the page full of images with minimal whitespace is nice; less clicking to see the results.


"Why keep trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade?"

Because it is simple and everyone can read it. I don't want to see code that is "greek to me."


Hydrogen is lighter than helium and will always be cheap and plentiful. Helium does have the advantage of being inert.


"Guido van Robot, or GvR for short, is a programming language and free software application designed to introduce beginners to the fundamentals of programming. GvR runs on Windows, Macintosh, and GNU/Linux, in a variety of languages. It's great in both the classroom and the home as a way of introducing people to the basic concepts of programming."

http://gvr.sourceforge.net/

Then on to python.


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