2012:
You
Me
Sussman, The
Dubs Guy
Kodak gallery programmer
The One Kodak refers to as the Mental Midget
The /polecats kebab/-able
A hikikomori or two from /jp/ seeking SICP wisdom
Python the Hard Way Guy, probably Zed Shaw
Mentifex
The ancient shitposter that honed his craft since modems were first 2400 baud
The guy that starts threads of woe of /prog/'s shittiness ,@(include >>2-1001)
MIA in 2012:
Furozen Voido (pastebin perhaps ran out of #define tokens)
Everyone from before 2008
The Health Sciences Library where Mentifex did his brain research is in a basement beneath the School of Nursing. One great discovery made there by Mentifex is that women think different about you when they get the hare-brained idea that you are probably a medical doctor, and they strike up conversations with you about their homework or about the brain journals that you are deeply immersed in. While studying the brain of Homo sapiens, Mentifex was serendipitously learning a lot about Femina aurifodiens and her Seattle subspecies. Mentifex always had better relationships with women from beyond Seattle than with Seattle natives, who made him feel rejected in all places except the Health Sciences Library, where some kind of pixie dust made him attractive to women instead of repulsive. For example, when a very pretty maiden in the library turned sideways to Mentifex and asked him about the medical uses of the papaya plant, known to him since his childhood in Panama, Mentifex launched into a discussion on the uses of papain, known to him from his minimum-wage job reading newspapers. Mentifex often wondered what would happen if he went out of his way to look even more like a doctor, perhaps wearing a white coat or borrowing a stethoscope from his doctor father. It was an unpleasant fact to learn, but women in Seattle were more interested in a guy's earning potential than in his innate qualities as a mensch. Some years before, Second Love had suddenly caught Mentifex unprepared by asking him out of the blue how much money he was hoping to earn per year when he got going in his chosen career. Mentifex had previously given the question serious thought and rather stupidly gave an honest answer, divulging an extremely conservative estimate of how much he might earn in a year. Second Love flashed into a rage of anger and cried out, "That's not much!" Mentifex wanted to explain his calculations, but the moment was over. Second Love regained her composure but something had changed between them. When Mentifex was drafted into the army and got promoted to Private First Class (PFC), Second Love addressed him as Private No Class. PFC was good enough for Mentifex himself, and when he got promoted to Specialist Fourth Class in Germany and stood in line for pay, he got snarled at for forgetting his rank and for saying, "PFC Murray reports for pay!" Just like Second Love, the army officer doling out the solido to the soldiers went into a huff and reminded SP4 Mentifex that he had been promoted, obviously unworthily, to a higher pay grade.
Back at the Health Science Library, I read all my favorite brain journals and I marveled at how few papers were being published about the high-level brain functions of thinking and reasoning. The neuroscientists were all stuck at the molecular level and very few of them soared to the heights of devising a theory of mind. My design for a mind was outside of the canon and could not mke any sense to the world of neuroscience unless I implemented the theory as artificial intelligence in a computer. My friends in Seattle were buying computers to use as word-processors and spreadsheets in their jobs. I held off until the Coleco ADAM came out.
I had no idea back then that you could build the AI Mind in JavaScript
Yes, when the technological singularity comes, it will no doubt be implemented in JavaScript.
C++ is a good language. It is not a perfect language because it inherits from C. C is a flawed language where many things are left undefined. C is an ancient artifact that serves no purpose outside of the domain of kernel design. Because of the improvements made upon C to form C++, beginning programmers and veteran programmers alike may be led astray, thinking that modern C usage is a good idea. It is a mistake to believe the success of C++ justifies the continued use and popularity of C. Just because C++ is successful does not mean the language it has inherited from is of high quality.