Are we in the worst of all possible worlds?

Good people are constantly being supplanted in favour of the greedy and sociopathic, over and over and over again.

Imagine if Gary Kildall had made the deal with IBM as was supposed to happen, instead of Gates.

http://www.tomrolander.com/GaryKildall/In%20memory%20of%20Gary%20Kildall.htm

Gary Kildall tried to push elegance in software. Imagine sane computing. Imagine if this person had influence over computing that Gates ended up having.

Actually, I can't imagine it, because some other monster would have come along. The demons are everywhere.

The human race is comprised of mostly nasty, selfish monsters. Our being conscious is a mistake and we shouldn't even be here, but that is a topic for another day.

People who try to do good seem to get stopped before they go too far, while the greedy monsters are completely free to run amok.

>>12

using sepples as an example of mathematical beauty

Have anything to say about the contents of the example? I mean, from where I can stand that particular part of sepples was designed following the principles of mathematical beauty, and it's not a coincidence that it's one of the worst parts of sepples.

I think it's more that they are upset that most people either have different values than them (their goal is to write beautiful and concise code, my goal is to get my team of indians to get my company's product out the door before the deadline)

I don't see how you can derive those values of "beautiful and concise code" without having them ultimately grounded in getting useful code out the door. Qualities of good code stem from the hatred of the process of writing code.

If you don't hate writing code but actually enjoy the process, you end up being the what >>22,33 is making fun of, a brainless monkey enjoying abstract art of endless boilerplate.

And if you agree that beautiful and concise code is actually the sort of code that's directly linked to supposed crazy productivity increases, then you have to explain why on Earth Lisp or HASCAL or Forth or whatever's your favorite poison is not a total superweapon, allowing the privileged class of Übermensch run circles around poor Java monkeys, in terms of acquired money and bitches as well.

Don't give me bullshit about network effects (new languages and technologies appear and dethrone incumbents all the time, only they all still follow the Worse Is Better model somehow) or "average programmers" dragging you down (you are supposed to be Übermensch, remember?). Nah, in my humble opinion the horrible truth is that your opinions on what helps with beautiful and concise code are total bullshit because they actively reject empiricism and are ashamed of being grounded in practical usefulness.

>>22,23 you know what's your problem to an extent you aren't trolling about it? It's not that you like intellectual masturbation, "writing code for the sake of writing code", it's that you lie to yourself and others about your real motivation which is to have other people admire your jerking off skills. That's the only explanation for why you're upset about them having other values despite the fact that that still leaves you perfectly capable of petting the one-eyed Python for the sake of pure art.