Popular Culture:

• Octopus Hair Style
• Monagoo: Anständig einkaufen ohne Elitessen-Merkmale im Crowdfunding
• Is ad blocking theft? ~ is advertizing assault?
• Police in India Will Use Weaponized Pepper Spray Drones on Protesters
• 'King of Germany' loses right to drive

Nerd Culture:

• qb.js: An implementation of QBASIC in Javascript
• The Boustrophedon Text Reader (via)

Science, Software, Hardware:

• Das Kabel wird zum USB-Hub
• Blutprodukte können Allergien gegen Lebensmittel übertragen

Zeroth World:

• Chimp Takes Out Drone
• Men more likely than women to time-travel and kill Hitler, study shows (via)

Comics/Images/Audios/Videos:

• Piracy
• Measurement System
• Everyone On The Internet
• Gets Me
• God vs Hitler
• Berufsverbot für Depressive denkbar

Quotes:

• Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority it is time to reform

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

JavaScript is the new C. Similar claims have already been made, but not only do I want to claim that JavaScript is the new C, I also claim that this is not as bad as some people might think.

Now, what most people agree upon, and what might be the reason for the existence of emscripten, is that JavaScript is widespread. Most computers will somehow support it. Is this a coincidence?

It is my observation that a programming language spreads only if it sucks sufficiently, but not too much, and has a single advantage. PHP sucks, but it doesn't matter: It was easy to deploy simple web applications with PHP. C++ sucks, but it is fast, a bit more abstract than and mostly compatible with old C code. Java sucks, but it was the first really practical and portable GUI framework, and the first really widespread web plugin, even before Flash. And of course, we don't have to talk about why C sucks, but its great advantage is its pointer arithmetic and that it can be used as a portable typed assembler.

On the other hand, looking at Haskell, I know many fanboys, but I also talked to people who hate this language or are at least not interested in it. For some people, it sucks too much, while for some people, it fits perfectly — I think this is a general pattern: The broader your audience, the worse your fit for an individual problem. And by evolutionary processes, while the languages that only fit a specific audience will stay inside that audience, the languages that fit all needs somehow will spread, especially if they happen to have one feature that makes them distinct from everything else.

And I think that this is the case with JavaScript. Many programmers appear not to like it much, but it gets most of the jobs done, and it runs everywhere, and it is trivial to deploy - the one feature that makes it distinct from everything else. Yes, C can be compiled for every platform, but deploying applications to people is a lot harder than just telling them to follow your link.

So, JS has many things that make it hard to use. I can totally agree with that. Its possibility to add stuff to objects at will, and just default everything to undefined until something bad happens, is annoying, for example. But so is C: A simple off-by-one-error in an array access can have consequences at a completely different part of the code, that is why there are frameworks to debug and test code. C and C++ use a type system to cope with these problems to some extent. JS does not enforce this, but there is a framework that allows you to do so.

That is pretty much the way it is done in Lisp: You can add type annotations to make the code more efficient and easier to debug, but you do not have to. Not adding type information can be extremely useful in the cases when the actual types are not clear from the beginning ("prototyping") and for small code snippets and simple hacks. Every larger project should utilize types. I would even argue that they should use dependent types, but this is (mostly) tightly coupled with purely functional programming.

By the way, this is not the only parallel to Lisp. And while many Lispers will probably object to JS being a Scheme in C clothes, there is some truth in this: JS has a comparably simple data serialization format (almost as simple as Lisp's), and it has runtime compilation of Strings – which can be used to build a macro system and local domain specific languages. There are even REPLS for JavaScript.

A main difference to Lisp dialects is that it has a richer Syntax that is closer to the commonly used programming languages nowadays, and (except for Common Lisp) it is more complicated to implement, therefore not prone to the Lisp curse.

You can work with it as you would with C/Java and basic structs, but you can as well implement algebraic types. It is probably not particularily good at eiter of these jobs, but also not too bad – it gets the job done. And like Java, it gets the job done without offering too much space for security critical bugs (even though there are things like XSS exploits, of course).

The problem with Java is, that it has the repute of being slow and memory hungry. In my opinion, this was the main disadvantage of all similar languages over C and C++: They are not "on the metal". I would argue that neither is C (and especially C++), but the correspondence to the underlying machine is more direct. JS still has the same problem – even though the JS engines are doing a very good job – but there is a new way people try to address it: Asm.js. It is amazing how fast stuff becomes, and how easy it is to embed it into other JS code. As an example, here is a probabilistic approximation of a Sierpinsky-4-simplex, written mainly in asm.js (notice that you can drag the zero-point and the endpoints of the four axes with the mouse):

On Firefox 36, this still lags a little, but the reason seems to be the rendering engine rather than JS. On Chromium and most WebKit-based browsers, this has no lag at all. Look at the code: it is a portable assembler that runs on every relevant platform. It is compatible with a lot of "legacy code" through emscripten - a killer-feature of C++. And it can be embedded in a programming language with already installed bindings for almost everything, especially, for many things that users get in touch with now. While other languages still bother with libraries for accessing and parsing websites, files, the user's configuration, networking, everything that really matters to most users can be done with JS. There is an API for binary file access, a preliminary API for push notifications, APIs for 2d and 3d graphics, realtime communication.

Of course, I am not saying that C will completely vanish. It did not vanish in favor C++, it did not vanish in favor of Java, and it will not vanish in favor of JavaScript. The Linux Kernel is still written mainly in C, and I do not think that this will change. But the design of shared libraries still bases on C mostly, and the standard library of C is the only thing that is usually taken for granted. My guess is that an increasing number of libraries and other languages will target embeddability in JS rather than C.

Furthermore, I want to make clear that I do not like JS, especially as it is often used superfluously on bad websites, or breaking originally good websites. But remember, we could have ended up with Visual Basic Script. Or CFML. Or XSLT.

Popular Culture:

• Finger mounted insect dissuasion device
• Wer depressiv ist, will anderen kein Leid antun
• Britische Schulen drohen mit Jugendamt, wenn Kinder "Killerspiele" spielen ~ schicken wir sie lieber in Schützenvereine.
• Der Puma-Pudel darf keine Marke sein ~ "Die Eigentumsrechte von Puma seien in diesem Fall höher zu bewerten als das Recht des Mannes auf Kunst- und Meinungsfreiheit."
• 10 Dinge, die man sich im Umgang mit depressiven Menschen besser verkneifen sollte
• Hakenkreuz geziegelt: "Es sollte ein vierblättriges Kleeblatt werden" ~ manchmal ist Dummheit eine Kunstform.

Nerd Culture:

• Clippy.js ~ "Our research shows that people love two things: failed Microsoft technologies and obscure Javascript libraries. Naturally, we decided to combine the two."
• Food Coloring Has A Fascinating Secret, And We Finally Have The Research To Explain It

Science, Software, Hardware:

• Britische Safari Nutzer können Google wegen Safari-Tracking verklagen ~ und wieso können sie nicht Apple verklagen, weil die nicht ihrer Sorgfaltspflicht nachgekommen sind?
• Google verändert Suchalgorithmus ~ sie haben schon alle erweiterten Features entfernt und dem ding Legasthenie beigebracht, somit ist das nur konsequent.
• Auswärtiges Amt hat sich weitgehend von Linux verabschiedet
• Arc Welder bringt Android-Apps auf den Rechner ~ habs noch nicht probiert, tbh.

Zeroth World:

• Smartes Türschloss August war zu gastfreundlich ~ "Hey, Smartphones sind doch so sicher, warum sperren wir gleich Häuser damit ab."
• A Baby Filled With Booze Will Be Your Favorite New Way To Get Bombed

Comics/Images/Audios/Videos:

• It's not propaganda
• Driven To Distraction
• Heaven
• Floored
• mildly nsfw Dreams

No Bock to draw a comic this week, but here is a 4d Hilbert Curve (you can drag the coordinate axes and zero-point, JavaScript required):

The coordinates were generated using this software.

ℐ¢н ♭ḯᾔ ∂αṧ Ш☤℮ṧεł √øм ℳαґṧ

Popular Culture:

• Why Does Nintendo Want This Superfan’s YouTube Money? ~ maybe because it is a company that does what it takes to get money? Maybe the easiest thing to do would be to boycott companies that behave that way. But this is not going to happen. And they know that.
• De Maizière verbietet deutsche Dschihad-Gruppe ~ wow. Das wird die jetzt aber abschrecken.
• "Share"-Button auf Facebook sorgt für Abmahnung #neuland
• Blind Artist Uses His Sense Of Touch To Create Beautifully Colorful Paintings
• Wenn der Henker im Todesauto nach Torgau kommt
• Kalorientabelle
• How to access your Android contacts online

Nerd Culture:

• Peregrine Church is creating playful street art around Seattle that only appears when it rains

Science, Software, Hardware:

• Online Hyphenation Tool
• Neudefinition des Kilogramms ~ na endlich.
• EU-Kommission will geographische Sperren im Internet abschaffen ~ und gleichzeitig das Urheberrecht stärken. Wie wollen die das machen? YouTube verbieten, Weichen zu stellen, und sie stattdessen auffordern, auch in anderen Ländern die Videos nicht zu zeigen?
• Use of NFS Considered Harmful

Zeroth World:

• Night vision eyedrops

Comics/Images/Audios/Videos:

• Broken Websites
• My dog ate him
• A CD Shattering
• Vegan Diet
• Big Foot
• The Cry Life

Quotes:

• Du solltest nie deine eigenen Prinzipien verraten Außer wenn du bei einer landen kannst oder wenn eine Gehaltserhöhung drin ist.
• The best way to a man's heart is through his fourth and fifth rib.
• Sometimes I use words I don't understand, so I can sound more photosynthesis.

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Es wird Ʒeit mal wieder etwas auf deutſch ʒu ſchreiben, ʒumal mir kein Analogon in der engliſchen Sprache bekannt iſt. Es geht um einen ganʒ beſtimmten Neologiſmus, naͤmlich „jein“, manchmal auch „jain“ – offenbar eine Miſchung aus „ja“ und „nein“. Es ſcheint irgendwie ein trend ʒu ſein, das in Chats inʒwiſchen ʒu benutʒen.

Nun habe ich generell gelernt, offen gegenuͤber neuen Trends ʒu ſein. Wurde ich am Anfang meiner Schulʒeit noch genoͤtigt, Texte von Leuten ʒu leſen, in denen ſie ſich daruͤber aufregten, daſs es jetʒt Angliʒiſmen wie „cool“ gaͤbe, die man korrekterweiſe ja „kuhl“ ſchreiben muͤſſte, entwickelte ſich dann eine Abneigung gegenuͤber Internetkuͤrʒeln wie „LOL“, und es kamen Buͤcher wie „Der Dativ iſt dem Genitiv ſein Tod“ heraus. Oh, und nicht ʒu vergeſſen, wie viele traͤnen ſind gefloſſen wegen der Rechtſchreibreform⸮ Und wie viele Leute weinten dem ſcharfen S nach, das ja angeblich abgeſchafft wurde⸮ Ein Geruͤcht, das ſich uͤbrigens tapfer ʒu halten ſcheint, dabei haben wir inʒwiſchen ſogar ein großes ẞ, alſo mehr als vorher. Und wie viele Leute trauern noch heute dem rhetoriſchen Frageʒeichen nach⸮ Alles eher unintereſſant fuͤr mich. Ein biſſchen nerviger finde ich da dann, daſs man Anfuͤhrungſʒeichen nutʒt, um Dinge hervorʒuheben. Und Deppenleerʒeichen ſind auch irgendwie unſchoͤn. Und was ich im Grunde garnicht leiden kann iſt es, „nen“ ſtatt „ein“ ʒu ſagen, denn dies iſt nicht einmal eine Abkuͤrʒung. Dennoch, Sprache entwickelt ſich. Was will man alſo machen⸮

Jedenfalls nutʒe ich durchaus auch gerne moderne Kuͤrʒel wie „-v“, um ausʒudruͤcken, daſs ich gerne mehr wuͤſſte. Beſonders haͤufig benutʒe ich dieſes Kuͤrʒel, um auf „jein“ ʒu antworten. Und hier wird klar, warum ich dieſes Wort nicht nur haͤſſlich ſondern auch unhoͤflich finde: Es ſagt uͤberhaupt nichts aus, außer, daſs man wohl irgendwie teilweiſe etwas richtiges geſagt hat, und teilweiſe nicht. Es bedarf aber immer weiterer Erklaͤrungen. Wenn dieſe nun immer prompt folgen wuͤrden, waͤre es nicht mehr als ein nerviges Fuͤllwort. Dummerweiſe ſcheinen diverſe Menſchen davon ausʒugehen, daſs ihr „jein“ fuͤr ſich ſtehend in irgendeiner Weiſe hilfreich ſei, ʒumindeſt muſs man ſie nicht ſelten auffordern, genauer ʒu werden – „-v“ eben. Ob man dann eine ſinnvolle Antwort kriegt iſt die Frage; nicht immer jedenfalls.

Freilich iſt niemand im Ʒwiſchennetʒ verpflichtet die eigenen Fragen ʒu beantworten. Aber wenn man ſowieſo nicht vorhat, dies ʒu tun, woʒu dann mit „jein“ antworten? Und wenn man antworten will, wieſo dann nicht gleich ſinnvoll? Wenn man auſdruͤcken will, daſs man eine Antwort geben will, die nur etwas laͤnger dauert, kann man auch kurʒ „moment…“ ſchreiben, oder – wie ich es gerne mache – den Satʒ anfangen und an einer Stelle mit „…“ unterbrechen, an der klar iſt, daſs noch mehr kommt.

Wie dem auch ſei: Bitte hoͤrt auf, dieſes graͤſſliche Wort ʒu benutʒen!

Did you know that LaTeX indents all paragraphs, except for the first one in a section? Combined with the uselessness of \nopagebreak, this gave me headaches today. I wanted LaTeX not to break the page at a certain point, because the line after it broke was introducing the formula, which was then on the next page. And somehow, all possibilities failed, except the sledgehammer that always works: a minipage.

So I used a minipage. The problem with minipages is that they seem to be actually considered as pages. And therefore, my paragraph was the first paragraph on this page, which is why LaTeX did not indent it.

Of course, explicitly using \indent was also useless. Because LaTeX knows best. And of course, there is a package for that.

I ended up with ... rephrasing my document. And I was wondering: Why do so many people let themselves control by this F60.5-religion?

Popular Culture:

• Warum Euer Preis-Spott Apple Freude macht
• Heute verkaufen auch Markenhersteller Ramsch

Science, Software, Hardware:

• The Early Days of CGI
• Fairphone 2: Schluss mit alten Schwächen
• PATH_MAX simply isn't ~ is there anything not fundamentally broken in IT?
• How to avoid "Makes sense if you already understand it."
• Harmful GOTOs, Premature Optimizations, and Programming Myths are the Root of all Evil (via) ~ also wtf
• If Programming Languages Were Harry Potter Characters (via ebd.)
• Partitioning natural numbers with pi

Zeroth World:

• The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
• App soll Schüler-Suizide vorbeugen

Comics/Images/Audios/Videos:

• Apple Watch
• NSFW Erziehung
• IT Support
• Reptoid
• The Tables Have Turned
• Other Side Of The World
• The Dolphins
• Phone
• Medusa

Quotes:

• When you are dead, you don't know you are dead. It is difficult only for the others. It is the same when you are stupid.
• Don't be afraid to fail. You're already super good at it.