Linux Users

Linux users (aka children), how's it feel to know there's an entire group of individuals who are better at computers than you are? Meet Windows users. They are better than you.

They understand the hardware better, they understand the basic principles of computer science better, they know how networks work better than you. They understand the pros and cons of filesystems (including ntfs) because on Windows, you get to choose FS's; they understand the principles behind operating system design because they run into phrases like "Active Directory" and "User Account Control"; they can probably program, too, since learning a scripting language(e.g. Jscript and Powershell) vastly improves productivity on Windows (and this really pisses you off, since programming was one thing you always failed at on Linux.) Oh, and they probably know Linux better than you, since most advanced Windows
users these days are ex-Linux users who managed to learn Windows years ago, when it was much less user friendly(DOS).

At this point, a confident individual would admit to himself he has a lot to learn about Windows and computers in general. But since you lack the self esteem to do that, you run back to Linux, install Tux Racer (or whatever) and keep repeating to yourself "at least I can run games. at least I can run games."

If you're looking for a job, all this hits you even harder, because you realize a lot of the jobs require Windows in one way or another. Even many of the Linux related jobs recommend Windows! At this point, you rationalize "well the only thing I know is Linux, so I must be a Linux expert!" as if knowing only one thing makes you an automatic expert, or that learning Windows forces you to forget Linux entirely.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver/compare/default.mspx
http://www.neowin.net/
http://www.xbox.com/
http://www.bing.com/
http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/
http://www.msn.com/

>>38
Is he really that much of a ``Lisp-fanatic''?
He mostly likes Emacs Lisp which is a fairly limited and antiquated(dynamicly scoped by default(lack of lexical scope), which is regarded as a bad trait by both the Common Lisp and Scheme community) Lisp dialect. He won't switch to better dialects for appears to me political reasons and not technical ones. (As a sidenote, most of the CL community's large code base is non-GPL licensed, but usually BSD, MIT, public domain or LLGPL(a more lax LGPL which allows static linking) licensed).

He's also the reason behind the MIT AI lab hacker community schism and all that Symbolics drama. Now those Lisp machines were true built from the ground up from Lisp (from CPU microcode to high-level applications). Their Zmacs and GUI environment were rather innovative (real presentations anyone? not the limited kind we get in Emacs+SLIME), oh and they had a C to Lisp compiler of course, since Lisp was the base language of the OS. Actually making a C to Lisp compiler probably wouldn't be terribly hard, but you will need some non-standard functionality(which is nonetheless present in a fairly efficient form in mainstream CL compilers) for operating with pointers directly. I'm not sure there's much to gain from translating C to Lisp, as Lisp's data is usually tagged which caries benefits and disadvantages, but when applied to C, I'd say it'd be more of a disadvantage. There are however quite a few Lisps which translate to C and integrate with it seamlessly.

So in closing, Stallman may like Lisp, but he will only use what he is comfortable with using politically. We're all grateful for Emacs as we use it a lot, but one should look at what possibilities existed many years ago and see how some were still superior to what Emacs is now.