appreciated

An Introduction.

A discussion of a variety of works that this author appreciates follows. + They are presented here with the hope that they spark some + interest in a prospective reader. This document is written with the expectation + that a reader has some experience and interest in software development.

+
+

cat-v.org

cat-v.org introduced me to the potential beauty of a well-written program. + Much of my study of programming and otherwise arts is now dedicated to the pursuit of that beauty.

The first of multiple sections of the site, I found harmful.cat-v.org's software section. + I initially found it curious that staples such as bash or PDF + may be considered bad or wrong. Near the bottom of the index page, it is written: + “At the moment a detailed rationale is not provided for most of this, so figuring out why some things are considered more or less harmful than others is left as an exercise for the reader. Here is a hint: complexity is the bane of all software, simplicity is the most important quality.” Deciding to take upon myself this curious challenge, I slowly became + educated upon what it means for a set of software to be, in a vague and aesthetic + sense, good. Supplied in tandem with regular exploration of software that + caught momentary fancy, the text available provided me some guidance.

A later discovered section of the site, quotes.cat-v.org, provided me with philosophical + food for thought. Those that have impacted me, the person, have been re-sourced from + their origin, then written below.

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.”
+ — Albert Einstein, translated by Paul Arthur Schilpp, Albert Einstein Philosopher—Scientist, PDF page 33 and PDF page 35
“What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education!”
+ — Grant Allen, Post-Prandial Philosophy, chapter XV
“there is nothing as boring as the truth” … “an intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.”
+ — Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, page 207
“la inspiración existe, pero tiene que encontrarte trabajando”
inspiration exists, but it has to encounter you at work
— Pablo Picasso, published in Tomás R. Villasante's Las ciudades hablan: identidades y movimientos sociales en seis metrópolis latinoamericanas, página 264
“I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.” … “At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way – and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay.”
+ — C. A. R. Hoare, The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture, PDF pages 7 and 8
“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”
+ — Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming, epigram 58
“One of the surest tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”
+ — T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, PDF page 138
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
— Richard Feynman, 1974 Caltech commencement address
“When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.”
+ — Steve Jobs, 1996 february Wired Magazine interview
“some people never go crazy.
+ what truly horrible lives
+ they must lead.”
+ — Charles Bukowski, Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame, PDF page 192

+
+

litcave.rudi.ir

I discovered this site some months previous to discovering cat-v.org. Perhaps I had found it when searching for vi implementations, for there was a time during which I searched for text editors for the sake of exploratory enjoyment. In any case, the software developed by this site's owner, Ali Gholami Rudi, continually amazes me.

Foremost, his implementation and partial port of Joseph Ossana and Brian Kernighan's troff is excellent. I use it for most documents that need be more glorious than a UTF-8 text file. This typesetting system enables me to create beautiful documents, and its usage continually sparks my interest in font design and data presentation. On a technical level:

Full UTF-8 unicode input support.
24-bit RGB color applicable to any text. See pages 5 and 7 of Neatroff Introduction for usage and otherwise details.
In addition to PostScript fonts, TrueType and OpenType fonts may be used. Wholesome support for OpenType features is implemented and accessible. For usage, see pages 2 and 8 of Neatroff Introduction.
Space shrinking, that which allows for more readable documents when used appropriately. See PDF pages 5 through 6 of Justification in Heirloom Troff for visual examples, and pages 4 and 11 of Neatroff Introduction for usage.
PostScript metadata, title and author and links and bookmarks in particular, may be set. In addition, images formatted as PostScript or PDF may be embedded, depending on which of the two is the intended output format. See page 6 of Neatroff Introduction and the set of PostScript-specific macros for usage.
Paragraph-at-once adjustment, that which may be used along with space shrinking to improve the readability of a document. So as to understand what that means in practice, see PDF pages 7 through 9 of Justification in Heirloom Troff, and page 7 of Neatroff Introduction for usage.
Right-to-left text support, with Farsi in particular being the author's language of interest. The author supplies a demonstrational document that I yearn to learn to read.

Each of the features above are useful in practice, with an article of my school work serving as a real example of a document benefitting from the above features applicable to the Latin alphabet.

His C compiler suite, featuring an assember, linker, standard libraries, and a compiler, for Linux operating systems running on either ARM or x86 architecture, is both small and largely standard-compliant. Admittedly, too much of the world's code is designed around GNU's compiler suite for this compiler suite to act a drop-in replacement in a majority of C projects, however it is in and of itself very usable.

Ali Gholami Rudi uses Linux, and does not use Xorg. Restricting himself from conventional graphics support, he develops tools that make his predicament more pleasant. He maintains a program that wraps around existing document viewing programs so as to view PDF and EPUB documents within the Linux framebuffer. He regularly develops a terminal emulator that allows for the usage of TrueType fonts in the Linux framebuffer. He's come to use vi, and so he maintains his own vi implementation, that which is small, POSIX portable, and designed for UTF-8. His admirable efforts often have useful and interesting results.

+
+

alpinelinux.org

Intrinsically, Linux is a problematic and error-prone hodgepodge of conflicting designs, even if driven by good intentions. Linux comes to mind not for being a clean or ingenious Unix clone, but instead for being a popular and messy operating system backed by large corporations.

Disdain aside, there are examples of good design among the mess, and Alpine Linux is one such example. Importantly, GNU's software is largely averted, with dependence falling upon their library only for the surprisingly portable binutils and GCC, those which a compilation environment is often comprised of, even if POSIX need be brought along with it. The C standard library used is musl, that which is standards-compliant, small, and otherwise strives for correctness, even when that pursuit leads to incompatibilities with GNU's libc. The usual Unix-borne utilities are provided by busybox. Though busybox's code is less than glamorous – see the ending minutes of this presentation given by its previous maintainer – it is small and mature, and certainly more usable than the usual selection, GNU's coreutils. Alpine Linux's installation images are generally less than 200 MiB in binary size, allowing for RAM booting to be a sane default. The software packages available in the repositories are numerous, and the package management software is expedient. Though the distribution-specific documentation does have some rough edges, it is extensive.

There are multiple Linux distributions that try to do better than GNU's libc and coreutils, however Alpine is the only one I've noticed to put each of Linux's many pieces together so that the system works well in practice. In particular, Alpine Linux is the only Linux distribution that does not use glibc that I've been able to wrangle into running Xorg. The mess of KISS Linux's many split repositories and sparse documentation causes more woes than required of a minimally bootstrapped operating system. Oasis Linux is amazingly ambitious, particuarly for preferring cproc over GCC or clang, yet too underbaked to feel useful. TinyCore Linux boots to RAM, and its modern incarnations boast smaller size than any other Linux distribution. Unfortunately, a lack of good documentation averts me from its use, despite having tinkered with it for many hours. The gap between toy and ready product may be bridged by good documentation. A move away from glibc would be ideal, however secondary to the documentation issue. As a side note: I imagine glibc is one of the greatest causes of increase in binary size from release to release, for it is famously inflationary. What was once 11 MiB – TinyCore Linux 3.0 – is now 21 MiB – TinyCore Linux 13.0.

Linux is messy, and improvement is extra messy, which has done well to feed Debian and Red Hat's popularity; Debian and Red Hat are mature, and rarely change, and so the same quirks mastered years ago continually apply, for better and worse. Though there are many distributions that try to do better, and occasionally do achieve betterment, a majority of such distributions are generally too malleable or obscure to be reliable. Alpine Linux appears to be the only Linux distribution in any position to upset the frequency of use of GNU's C standard libraries and system utilities in actual practice, being both well-documented and mature.

+
+

bellard.org

I found Fabrice Bellard's web site during the year 2021. I was amazed by how much could be accomplished by someone both dedicated and creative.

Fabrice Bellard started what has become the media encoding software, ffmpeg. A subset of ffmpeg, libavcodec, has become a core part of many pieces of software, with there being a long list of such software, maintained by wikipedia contributors. On a personal level, ffmpeg has served as software for recording video, recording audio, the otherwise encoding of images and video and audio, and in particular for encoding animations from images. If not for it, I doubt the current existence of a suitable replacement.

Fabrice Bellard also started the Linux emulation software, QEMU. QEMU paired with KVM is a go-to when needing to emulate an operating system with native-ish performance. People who tinker use it quite a bit, and I imagine there are some businesses whose infrastructure depends upon QEMU.

An entrant into The International Obfuscated C Code Contest built upon, tinycc has become a mature C99 compiler. It is about an order of magnitude faster than GCC, and produces reasonably optimal code. C code can be either compiled or interpreted, with the interpreter functionality being baked well enough to be actually useful during development. When using either Windows AME, Alpine Linux, or OpenBSD, this is my first choice of C compiler.

Some lesser known however extremely impressive examples of his programming prowess are listed at the index of his site. Some particularly eye-catching ones include

hardware emulators that allow running Linux or Windows in-browser via javascript,
an experimental lossless compression model built around neural networks,
having computed what was at a time the largest amount of digits of PI ever, on consumer hardware,
in some way that befuddled even the IOCCC judges, a program to inflate Lena from itself, and
a useful software-only subset of OpenGL.

+
+

other.stanleylieber.com

I found other.stanleylieber.com after traversing web sites regarding 9front, the foremost being cat-v.org and 9front.org. I first encountered it during the year 2022. This site encourages the best kind of doom scrolling. Image after image, chances are good that one of every few images strikes interest. That sort of consistent quality buys trust, and that trust may be spent in continued viewer attention. It's a sort of magic that I'd like to capture.

+
+

openbsd.org

Having mentioned above that Linux is a mess, it feels suitable to now explain a Unix derivative that is not. OpenBSD split from NetBSD 1.0 in 1995, which in turn was based upon 4.4BSD-Lite, which in turn was based upon twenty-odd years of development upon a Unix Version 6 installation performed at University of California, Berkeley. In the time between 1995 and now, OpenBSD has become an operating system that is stable, secure, and excellently documented. The manuals are concise without erring on being terse, the system defaults are sane and secure, and things do not break often.

Glittering generalities presented, some real examples may provide some validity to the claims given. Each program purpose-written for the distribution has a man page written in a consistent style, featuring English that is appropriately formal, a unique feature among Unix clones. Linux in particular often features man pages that are too long to grok and poorly written – commonly those written for GNU's software – or too little more than a list of options – most notably busybox. On OpenBSD, for those external programs that may be included in an installation by way of file sets, packages served by the repositories, or the ports tree, all documentation is included, that much being the best that can be reasonably expected. The programmer's documentation – so as to be explicit, this is one such page – is sincerely better written than any other set I've encountered.

Options that don't make sense to be enabled by default are not enabled by default. Audio recording is disabled, video recording is disabled, and daemons installed are not suddenly marked to run at boot. This last point may feel obvious, however I distinctly remember Debian Linux exhibiting the opposite behavior. There was a time during which a younger and less aware version of myself had apache starting upon each boot of my laptop PC.

Never has OpenBSD presented me with an issue that feels arbitrary. Installation makes sense, post-installation makes sense, with wifi setup being particularly well documented, and regular usage makes sense. These are vague qualities that describe general feelings, with those general feelings being my focus. There is a sense of comfort that eludes any Linux distribution I've used. It's a boring comfort, a stable comfort, a good one.

POSIX conformance completes this operating system. It is not a forgotten toy, or a promising dream, but a real and maintained product, compatible with real programs. A list of some that I value follows.

tinycc is available in the repositories. On the occasions during which tinycc is not suitable, the compiler included with the comp file set, clang, works well, if much slower.
plan9port is available in the repositories. sam, acme, and 9term are the main attractions. I recommend explicitly setting a bitmap font that suits your preference. + A personally performed conversion of Go Regular is usually my first choice. + There are a variety of fonts downloadable from 9front's git repository, with the most simple method of download being a current snapshot of the git repository. + Of 9front's conversions, I prefer DejaVu Sans. Alternatively, sl's various conversions, or the conversion I performed of URW's C059 may be suitable. P.S.: Conversion of a scalable font may be performed on Unix using plan9port's fontsrv, using either the method described here or judicious use of plan9port's 9p. Also on Unix, Sigrid's ttfs gives perfect results. Alternatively, conversion may be performed by means of ttf2subf, DRAWTERM, and a networked 9front installation. That last requirement may be fulfilled by an account with SDF's public 9front, OpenBSD's vmd – see also wiki.9front.org and armeye.github.io, or an installation of 9front on real hardware, the last of which may be difficult to satisfy as a result of lacking hardware support.
cURL is, of course, available in the repositories.
mutt, the mail client, is available in the repositories.
NetSurf, a web browser that balances current web site compatibility and resource usage well, is in the repositories. A practical majority of the HTML and CSS in use today are implemented.
mμPDF and GhostScript, both of which are particularly useful for document consumption and preparation, are available in the repositories. The practical use of typesetting systems, such as the aforementioned neatroff, and the now mentioned KerTeX and XeTeX, depend upon these two programs, or close equivalents. Allow me to indulge in a tangent: using either of these requires digital typefaces. For these purposes exactly, the developers of mμPDF and Ghostscript, known as Artifex, have worked with URW to produce a public release of professionally produced digital clones of popular typefaces. These are suitable for documents and user interfaces alike, serving an important role in freely distributed operating systems particularly. They have been specially licensed to be embedded in any PostScript or PDF file. Peter Deutsch of Artifex described the transaction as a donation of commodity items for the sake of brand appreciation. They are available in several formats – some descriptions may be found at fonts.github.io's appendix and The XeTeX Companion, and some of the OpenType iterations provide supplemental glyphs as OpenType features. + There's a lot more out there than these thirty five, and here are some pleasant avenues from which to find more. +
- The LATeX Font Catalogue features a long list of well-categorized typefaces, in a mix of PostScript and OpenType formats. Each shown here is distributed freely, and several contain vast character sets designed for typesetting first and foremost.
- The Luxi fonts were designed and released by Bigelow and Holmes, of Lucida fame, some twenty-odd years ago. The serif typeface included is described as “a modification of Lucida … fitted to the same widths as Times Roman and with modified serifs but keeping the x-height of Lucida”. See PDF page 3 of A short history of the Lucida Math fonts, one of B&H's multiple good reads to be found on TUGboat. The sans-serif typeface included inherits some of Lucida's grace. Much later, in late 2016, Bigelow and Holmes freely released the Go fonts, those which contain an extensive set of pan-European glyphs, Greek and Cyrillic included. Here's a description of the rationale behind these typefaces, excerpted from an interview with Chuck Bigelow: ‘the most recent thing we did – which is not called Lucida – for engineers at Google who developed a programming language called Go. And one of them, Rob Pike, worked at Bell Labs. And we had licensed Lucida to Bell Labs for a programming language [sic] called Plan 9, which is obscure, but kind of in its cult way, well known. And then they did the Go language. Just last year, they said, “Look, we have this language. We distributed it for free. It’s open source software. Anybody can exchange it for any reason, and copy it, and can even go in and change it.” And we’d never allowed that before because we didn’t want people artistically to mess up our designs. And we defended that even when the big companies like Microsoft and Apple wanted to manipulate stuff without our permission. We had to say, “No, you have to have our permission. We’ll work with you, but you can’t do it on your own.” But, with Rob Pike there was just something about the proposal that we liked. He said, “You know, what do you think? What about it?” We said, “Okay, we can do it.” And we’d done some free fonts, but they weren’t open [the Luxi fonts]. And we took those. And we adjusted them to the Go format in TrueType because the Go language, they’d developed TrueType rasterizing tools and graphical tools [see golang.org/x/image/font]. And we settled with Go that we would do not just the Roman types, or the Latin-based types, but we would add in Greek, and Cyrillic, and a bunch of symbols and graphic characters that Microsoft had defined. So, instead of a font of two hundred and fifty characters, we had like six hundred and sixty characters. And we did it in a tremendous hurry, always in a hurry. … Whether the type will become vastly used, I don’t know. But anybody can use it for web fonts or anything. … Early on, we observed that popular typefaces often had non-Latin versions. Times Roman was the first because customers in other countries would ask for Times Roman, but for Greek or for Cyrillic. And Helvetica, when it became popular, had the same question. So, we thought we’d reverse that. Let’s design Greek and Cyrillic before people want it because, if it was a mark of success for a typeface incrementally, what if we designed them? Maybe it will help them be a success now.’ For user interface purposes, these typefaces have spoiled this author.
- Google Fonts, truetype.org, fontlibrary.org, Use & Modify, Debian's package repositories, and fontain.org feature aggregations of open-source fonts, those which any person is permitted to both utilize and change. Coelacanth and EB Garamond are head-turners, both of which have been developed using FontForge. As a partially relevant bonus, some design tips and book recommendations are offered to aspiring fontographers by fontlibrary.org.
- The League of Movable Type, Open Source Publishing, indestructible type*, Velvetyne Type Foundry, Collletttivo, and Arkandis are each digital type foundries that solely design open-source fonts.
- I am personally fond of RW Garamond, a collaboratively developed typeface – see garamond.org and ctan.org for the lineage – reminiscent of the typographic style of centuries past. It has small caps and old-style figures. Being derived from Garamond No. 8, as distributed at ghostpdl/pcl/urwfonts, it is licensed as according to the terms of the Affero Free Public License, without exception. The licensing is discussed further on the associated Wikipedia page, and described in full at Artifex's web site.
- FreeFont is a continuation of URW's Nimbus Serif, Nimbus Sans, and Nimbus Mono, each re-named FreeSerif, FreeSans, and FreeMono respectively. A vast character set is supplied. These derivatives are licensed under version of the GNU Public License, though with an exception so as to permit embedding each typeface in a PDF.
- Fontshare features fonts designed by the Indian Type foundry, with all being free for commercial use. In a similar vein, the professional digital type foundry Paratype was commissioned by the Russian Federation to produce publically-distributed Latin and Cyrillic typefaces, with PT Serif and PT Sans having resulted. Adobe publically released Source Serif, Source Sans, and Source Code Pro. Source Serif in particular is available in a variety of optical sizes.
- The Cooper Hewitt museum professionally commissioned a sans-serif typeface by the same name, that which has been publically released in source form. +
- Wikipedia's page dedicated to Open-Source Unicode typefaces and SIL International's font listing are each useful for choosing a typeface with support for a wide variety of languages. DejaVu is my go-to when such a typeface is needed.
- Thatcher Ulrich's Tuffy is a rare example of a truly public domain typeface.
- Edward Tufte, an accomplished author, has collaboratively produced “a Bembo-like font for the computer”, that which is explicitly designed with publication usage in mind.
- glukfonts and exljbris each offer some free typefaces, with downloading being a singular click, rather than a game of hoop jumping. Typodermic offers some portions of typefaces – including the often seen and seldom used Pricedown.
- The Brill Typeface is seriffed, contains roughly 6000 pan-European glyphs, and is free for non-commercial use.
- Hanazono Mincho is a mono-spaced and seriffed typeface, with its claim to fame being its whopping 100-thousand-plus character set.
- Kurinto is a collection of several unicode typefaces, presented in a user-accessible manner.
- Code2000, a shareware typeface once hosted on a now defunct web site, supports a wide variety of scripts, by means of roughly 50000 glyphs. The similarly licensed Everson Mono aims to compete with Courier in general use, including roughly 9000 glyphs.
- A revival of an almost forgotten typeface may found in Igino Marini's rendition of The Fell Types.
- Bitsteam's Charter and Courier 10 Pitch may now be found in TrueType format at the web site of Roland Stroud, writer and physician. Alternatively, Bitstream's Charter and Courier may be found in Type 1 format, distributed with Xorg. Bitstream's extensive Cyberbit, released freely for non-commerical use, may be found at an archive of a now long offline NetScape FTP server.
- FontMeme, Fontesk, dafont, FontSpace, and 1001fonts each feature lists of fonts free for commercial use. It's a very mixed bag.
+
surf, a web browser that acts as a minimal wrapper around the ginormous WebKit, is available in the repositories.
Firefox: it works, so long as there's a gigabyte or so of memory to spare. The builds of Firefox distributed in the repositories are intentionally restricted to accessing ~/Downloads, and feature the Unix functionality of CTRL + A, CTRL + E, CTRL + W, and CTRL + U in text input contexts. This program is just about necessary for bank and school interactions, and for the popular methods of social interaction over an internet connection. Even Advent of Code needs OAuth, which means third-party cookies and JavaScript. Privacy-first Firefox configurations do exist, but aren't practical for a majority of the use cases in which Firefox or a near equivalent is needed – gmail.com, outlook.com, discord.com, youruniversity.edu, yourbank.com and so on. The best that can be done with Firefox is generally to use DuckDuckGo - or Mojeek if you're brave – and to install UBlockOrigin to curve the web's visual harrassment. P.S.: The JavaScript-disabling option provided by UBlockOrigin is particularly useful to selectively enable for web sites that have a paywall. Paywalls are often enforced using JavaScript, in which case this feature disables the JavaScript that does the paywalling. Some of the frequenters of irc.oftc.net's #cat-v well describe the sentiment I share.
```
+irc.otfc.net, #cat-v: 2023 June 28
+11:40:44 invoked → i don't feel shame in using firefox, it's mostly resignation mixed with disgust
+11:43:39 sigrid → it's not really about shame, I use firefox too
```
ffmpeg, the media conversion and recording and playback utility, is available in the repositories.
ImageMagick, the image conversion, transformation, and filtration utility, is available in the repositories.
git, of course, is available in the repositories.
darkhttpd, a suitable HTTP server for local file transfer, is available in the repositories.
DRAWTERM, an excellent program for graphical login to a 9front system, is available in the repositories.
neatroff, though unavailable in the repositories, compiles and runs without hassle.
mtPaint, a program suitable for digital drawing and animation, is available in the repositories.
pkg_locate, analagous to Debian's apt-file, greatly simplifies searching for correct header files for source code compilation.
ircII, the most mature maintained IRC client, is included in the repositories. So as to understand the myriad of commands specific to IRC, the information accessible through this program's /help command is the best-written documentation I've found. This IRC client is not only capable of DCC file transfer, it features the original implementation. Should the DCC file transfer give you trouble, as it has done for me, attempt using irssi, that which is both capable of DCC file transfer and available in the repositories.
OpenXcom, a source port of X-COM: UFO Defense, is available in the repositories. A clean copy of the game data may be found in the gog.com release, and then extracted via innoextract, the latter of which is additionally available in the repositories. This being my first and only extended venture into a strategy game, I thoroughly enjoy it. Some well-produced coverage of this game may be found here.
st, a reasonable terminal emulator, compiles without hassle. There are no “Gotcha!” moments to be had here; the same config.h and patches that work on Linux work in this context too. Using a graphical terminal emulator requires a good monospaced typeface. Raph Levien's Inconsolata is popular for good reason. Go Mono is another personal favorite. Mark Simonson, a professional type designer with an impressive career, freely released Anonymous Pro. Adrian Frutiger's OCR-B is a long-held standard in fixed-width text, and this free adaptation by multiple authors works well in a terminal. Maybe less immediately attractive but undeniably universally legible is Courier, with its regularly available descendants being the purely commercial iterations distributed with Windows and MacOS, IBM's official digitization of the original – this one doesn't feel right, FreeMono – reasonable, Courier Prime, and Bitstream's freely distributed Type1 iteration – this one's just right. Typodermic's fonts free for commerical use include NK57 Monospace, that which comes in a variety of weights and widths. Microsoft's Cascadia Code is another suitable choice, and those with access to Windows Vista or later – or maybe to a copy of PowerPoint, or simply FontShop – may use Consolas, which is great. Fans of bitmap fonts may be pleased by The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack, that which is composed of bitmap fonts extracted from a wide variety of decades-old personal computer firmware. Some particular stand-outs for 1920 by 1080 pixel displays include IBM PS/55 re. and Cordata PPC-400. Spleen 8x16, converted by means of bdf2subf, has come to be my fixed-width replacement for Pellucida Mono – see TUGboat, Volume 26, No. 3, and TUGboat, Volume 39, No. 3, and $PLAN9/font/pelm – when using acme. unscii contains even more characters. univga is an oldie and a goodie. XOrg's misc 10x20 is workable. ProFont OTB has grown on me.
vitetris, an implementation of Alexey Pajitnov's Tetris that will run in a usual terminal emulator, is available in the repositories.
gtypist, a sincerely beneficial ncurses typing tutor, is available in the reposories. +
FluidSynth, a utility for rendering MIDI data to PCM audio, is available in the repositories. So as to use this software, you will need at least one soundfont. Many complete options are listed on the FluidSynth wiki, the MuseScore handbook, and synthfont.com.
sox, that which is particularly useful for mixing audio, is available in the repositories.
LMMS, a graphical program designed for music production, is available in the repositories. +
FontForge and the LCDF Typetools each facilitate inspection and creation of digital typefaces. They're both available in the repositories.
lldb and gdb each may fill the essential role of a debugger. lldb comes with the distribution's comp file set, and gdb is in the repositories.

The programs that come with the distribution and are developed by the distributors are mature. ed and sh are each designed for human use, as opposed to busybox's maimed ed implementation, or Debian's Almquist Shell. The vi implementation handles UTF-8 unicode, while also not taking 20 or more MiB of binary space. This is not the norm on modern Unix; usually, either the very large Vim or the Unicode-mangling busybox vi are used. For those who crave emacs, there is an original micro emacs implementation included with the distribution. So as to prevent carpal tunnel caused by repeated use of CTRL on an ANSI or ISO PC keyboard, I recommend remapping CAPS LOCK to the left CTRL key, as documented here. For those who have content to host, OpenBSD has its own HTTP server, and its own SSL implementation to match it. OpenBSD has its own sound system, its own man page programs, its own kernel-resident virtual machine software, and most famously, its own SSH implementation. Not only do these implementations mark past creative effort, for their development is ongoing. Recent releases are announced first by mailing list, which are then often re-announced on the web. Development is consistently constant.

There was a single feature that cemented my decision to stick with OpenBSD. Aside from Xorg's installation being largely automatic, the touchpad driver worked. When using Debian, the default touchpad driver was … awful. I found a singular alternative driver, that which worked about as awfully. Despite haggling with xinput, it never felt good to use. Months after the fact, I found some magic words which work to better the behavior of one of those drivers, Synapics: synclient AccelFactor=0, and for those who like tap-to-click, synclient TapButton1=1. I suffered the same issues on Alpine Linux, and have now confirmed similar behavior on CRUX Linux. And yet, upon installing OpenBSD and then starting Xorg, and then moving the mouse, it felt good! There was no choppiness; the movement was smooth. Though there was some mouse acceleration I did not like, that was simple enough to disable via xinput, after which the touchpad behavior has been perfect, far better than anything I've found before or since.

OpenBSD provides my best preferred digital work environments, both on laptop and desktop hardware. For many months, a 12-or-so year-old laptop – of this make and model – dual booting between Alpine Linux and OpenBSD by means of GRUB has performed gracefully – they really don't make laptop keyboards the way they used to! On a desktop PC, a dual boot between Windows AME and OpenBSD by means of rEFInd serves well.

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Envisioning Information

I found this book after having read about its author, Edward Tufte, in the 9front documentation. Having come to love 9front's text editors – sam and acme, I felt inclined to read some of the inspirational work. Understanding that sam and acme's designs were products of the 1990s, I was drawn towards Envisioning Information, the work that Edward Tufte published in 1990. I obtained a digital copy, transferred it to a 2013 iPad, and over the course of some weeks, read.

What I found within the pages continually earned my attention, and then earned my earnest thought. A majority of the pages feature examples of either excellent or poor data presentation, along with discussion and analysis of the given examples. A purely textual excerpt that particularly struck me follows.

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What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be “boiled down” and “simplified”? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information. Often the less complex and less subtle the line, the more ambiguous and less interesting is the reading. Stripping the detail out of data is a style based on personal preference and fashion, considerations utterly indifferent to substantive content. … So much for the conventional, facile, and false equation: simpleness of data and design = clarity of reading. Simpleness is another aesthetic preference, not an information display strategy, not a guide to clarity. What we seek instead is a rich texture of data, a comparative context, an understanding of complexity revealed with an economy of means. … But, finally, the deepest reason for displays that portray complexity and intricacy is that the worlds we seek to understand are complex and intricate.
+ — Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information, page 51

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After reading and thoroughly enjoying this book, I found myself trying an essay of his, titled The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. I found myself enamored in a way similar to my recent experience with Envisioning Information, though focused on a new topic upon which I was also uneducated. It is here that I came to understand the value of real paragraphs. A trifecta of excerpts follows.

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In the reports, every single text-slide uses bullet-outlines with 4 to 6 levels of hierarchy. Then another multi-level list, another bureaucracy of bullets, starts afresh for a new slide. How is it that each elaborate architecture of thought always fits exactly on one slide? The rigid slide-by-slide hierarchies, indifferent to content, slice and dice the evidence into arbitrary compartments, producing an anti-narrative with choppy continuity. Medieval in its preoccupation with hierarchical distinctions, the PowerPoint format signals every bullet's status in 4 or 5 different simultaneous ways: by the order in sequence, extent of indent, size of bullet, style of bullet, and size of type associated with various bullets. This is a lot of insecure format for a simple engineering problem. The format reflects a common conceptual error in analytic design: information architectures mimic the hierarchical structure of large bureaucracies pitching the information. Conway's Law again. In their report, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board found that the distinctive cognitive style of PowerPoint reinforced the hierarchical filtering and biases of the NASA bureaucracy during the crucial period when the Columbia was damaged but still functioning … At the same time, lower-level NASA engineers were writing about the possible dangers to the Columbia in several hundred emails, with the Boeing reports in PP format sometimes attached. The text of about 90% of these emails simply used sentences sequentially ordered into paragraphs; 10% used bullet lists with 2 or 3 levels. These engineers were able to reason about the issues without employing the baroque hierarchical outlines of the original PP pitches. Good for them.
+ — Edward Tufte, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, 2nd Edition, page 12 +
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+ Gerstner's blunt action shutting down the projector suggests that there are better tools for doing business analysis than reading aloud from bullet lists: “Let's just talk about your business.” Indeed, Gerstner later asked IBM executives to write out their business strategies in longhand using the presentation methodology of sentences, with subjects and predicates, nouns and verbs, which then combine sequentially to form paragraphs, an analytic tool demonstratively better than slideware bullet lists. “Let's just talk about your business” indicates a thoughtful exchange of information, a mutual interplay between speaker and audience, rather than a pitch made by a power pointer pointing to bullets. PowerPoint is presenter-oriented, not content-oriented, not audience-oriented. PP advertising is not about content quality, but rather presenter therapy: “A cure for the presentation jitters.” “Get yourself organized.” “Use the AutoContent Wizard to figure out what you want to say.”
+ — Edward Tufte, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, 2nd Edition, page 4 +
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+ At a talk, paper handouts of a technical report effectively show text, data graphics, images. Printed materials bring information transfer rates in presentations up to that of everyday material in newspaper sports and financial pages, books, and internet news sites. An excellent paper size for presentation handouts is A3, 30 by 42 cm or about 11 by 17 inches, folded in half to make 4 pages. That one piece of paper, the 4-pager, can show images with 1,200 dpi resolution, up to 60,000 characters of words and numbers, detailed tables worthy of the sports pages, or 1,000 sparkline statistical graphics showing 500,000 numbers. That one piece of paper shows the content-equivalent of 50 to 250 typical PP slides.
+ — Edward Tufte, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within, 2nd Edition, page 30

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It is through these paragraphs and others that I came to realize the inappropriacy of deeply heirarchical lists, that realization having prompted me to rewrite this page of appreciations. For the sake of comparison, a copy of the previous iteration, last touched 2023 march 31, is kept.

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Advent of Code

Advent of Code has taught me how to use a struct, why and when data structures should be calloc'd instead of dumped on the stack, how to use free, what “Dijkstra's Algorithm” is, and a lot of little details in-between. Participating has closed the gap between theory and practice, and for that I am very thankful. Linked here is a video snippet of an eventual solution after three hours of attempt.

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miscellany

Ken Thompson participated in a captivating interview by Brian Kernighan.
Rob Pike irregularly updates his blog. Russ Cox regularly updates his series of articles, and occasionally shares videos of what expert programming looks like. Both he and David Given can be downright mesmerizing to watch while displaying their prowess and explaining their logic.
Doug McIlroy conceptualized Unix pipes. He recently gave some fascinating context to Unix's upbringing, featuring an executive with poor vision and a helicopter.
Some time ago, Rob Pike gave a concise overview on where modern computer languages fail. More recently, he gave a talk on his most recent solution, Google's Go programming language. In a single sentence: a healthy blend of simplicity, concurrency, stability, garbage collection, UTF-8, networked dependency management, and high-level libraries, and good tools surrounding. For more than a sentence, see his most recent overview on where Go fills a niche.
“Dijkstra said that computing was about controlling complexity. And we have failed miserably.”
+ — Joe Armstrong, The Mess We're In, 43 minutes and 40 seconds
Posy consistently produces artistically and informationally captivating audio-visual spectacles.
SimplyTranslate is Google Translate with an interface that feels good to use.
2 Ton Digital has produced a video showcasing the benefits that may be gained from effortful assembly programming in a world full of high-level languages.
dict.org features an aggregation of several free dictionaries, that which is very responsive and without any advertisements. I have written a script to search for a word via either stdin or a command line argument, using the dedicated DICT protocol.
SomaFM features internet radio without advertisements. Illinois Street Lounge is my go-to.
ngmi.work has a real sense of style.
2bit.neocities.org takes an artistic limitation to its limits.
Reading The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst has provided me with a wholesome introduction to good typography.
Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking is a wonderful method of getting the mind to wondering.
Uncyclopedia is an encyclopedia with a sense of humor.
Devuan is Debian without systemd. +
copy.sh/v86 is a full PC hardware emulator that runs in web browsers that support Web Assembly.
veir.neocities.org features wonderfully elaborate works of graphical art.
fqa.9front.org is the only documentation I've encountered with a good sense of humor. Thanks, sl.
tilde.institute provides free accounts to a network-connected OpenBSD installation. Along with this, git and dedicated sub-domain capable of serving HTML and running CGI is provided.
The progress of an in-development role-playing game with excellent music may be found at murumart.neocites.org.
“It's a little ridiculous to have to trick myself into believing in my own work, and even more ridiculous that I can be tricked so simply, like a child enraptured at a magic act. But creative output of any kind depends upon a steady stream of tiny self-delusions – guardrails to keep yourself from veering into a pit of self-doubt and despair.”
+ — R. E. Hawley, Write It in Garamond
“If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.”
— John Carmack, 2002 january 2 slashdot.org post
“DON'T TRY”
— Charles Bukowski, his grave
“Matisse does a drawing, then he recopies it. He recopies it five times, ten times, each time with cleaner lines. He is persuaded that the last one, the most spare, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and yet, it's usually the first. When it comes to drawing, nothing is better than the first sketch.”
— Pablo Picasso, translated by Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso, page 66
Second system syndrome applies to more than computing alone.
“The primary issue with racism is that it Stops. People. From. Thinking. … people turn off their brains, when they choose to be racist … it's something that a lot of us are guity of at some point in our lives or another. Anybody who's ever laughed at a racist joke is guity of it. I can't say I'm not guity of having turned off my brain at points in my life, and I can't say +that I haven't made a silly snicker at a racist joke, whether it's about my race or somebody else's at some point in life, and most people watching this video that are honest with themselves probably … +you probably didn't go through twenty, or forty, or sixty years alive and never hear a racist joke and laugh, or snicker at one point. +… The racist is going to look at the three people that do fit the stereotype and say, ‘see, I'm right!’ And that's where this is really f***ing stupid and really f***ing dumb. +… The issue here is that people decide to just turn off their brain. And here's the real shameful s*** when it comes to turning off your brain. Here's the part that really f***in' sucks, is that you start to project that out into the world, is that you believe yourself. So now you're believing your own bulls***; and by the way, one of the most dangerous things you can do in the world is to Believe. Your Own. Bulls***. The most dangerous s*** that you can do is believe the crap that comes out of your mouth is correct. You should say the stuff that you say, but then I want you to think about it. I want you to think, really hard, about +whether what you actually said, is true. Before you just believe it just because you said it. You're gonna say a lot of stuff that's not true.”
Louis Rossman, A word on racism(and why it's bulls***)
When one stops believing their own BS, one can stop believing anyone else's too.
“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.”
— According to wikiquote.org, stated by Pablo Picasso in "The Artist, Vol. 93 (1978) p. 5"
“I can't come back, I don't know how it works … Goodbye, folks!”
—Oz in The Wizard of Oz 1939 film, 1 hour 35 minutes 16 seconds
Alice: “Oh no no no … thank you, but–but I just wanted to ask you which way I ought to go.”
Cheshire Cat: “Well, that depends, on where, you want to get to…?”
Alice: “Well, it really doesn't matter. As long as I c—”
Cheshire Cat: “Then, it really doesn't matter, which way, you go!”
— Alice in Wonderland 1951 film, 39 minutes 41 seconds
“At the same time that Thompson and Ritchie were on their blackboard, sketching out a file system, I was sketching out how to do data processing on this blackboard by connecting together cascades of processes and looking for a kind of prefix notation language for connecting processes together, and failing because it's very easy to say "cat into grep into …", or "who into cat into grep", and so on; it's very easy to say that, and it was clear from the start that that was something you'd like to say. But there are all these side parameters that these commands have; they don't just have input and output arguments, but they have the options, and syntactically it was not clear how to stick the options into this chain of things written in prefix notation, cat of grep of who [i.e. cat(grep(who …))]. Syntactic blinders: didn't see how to do it. So I had these very pretty programs written on the blackboard in a language that wasn't strong enough to cope with reality. So we didn't actually do it. And over a period from 1970 to 1972, I'd from time to time say, "How about making something like this?", and I'd put up another proposal, another proposal, another proposal. And one day I came up with a syntax for the shell that went along with the piping, and Ken said, "I'm going to do it!" He was tired of hearing all this stuff, and that was – you've read about it several times, I'm sure – that was absolutely a fabulous day the next day. He said, "I'm going to do it." He didn't do exactly what I had proposed for the pipe system call; he invented a slightly better one that finally got changed once more to what we have today. He did use my clumsy syntax. He put pipes into Unix, he put this notation [Here McIlroy pointed to the board, where he had written f >g> c] into shell, all in one night. The next morning, we had this—people came in, and we had—oh, and he also changed a lot of—most of the programs up to that time couldn't take standard input, because there wasn't the real need. So they all had file arguments; grep had a file argument, and cat had a file argument, and Thompson saw that that wasn't going to fit with this scheme of things and he went in and changed all those programs in the same night. I don't know how … And the next morning we had this orgy of one-liners.”
Doug McIlroy, The Unix Oral History Project
“Intelligence is positively correlated with being nice to others.”
— Salvatore Sanfilippo, a personal site of his
“I think modern art's almost total pre-occupation with subjectivism has led to anarchy and sterility in the arts. The notion that reality exists only in the artist's mind, and that the thing which simpler souls had for so long believed to be reality is only an illusion, was initially an invigorating force, but it eventually led to a lot of highly original, very personal and extremely uninteresting work. In Cocteau's film Orpheé, the poet asks what he should do. 'Astonish me,' he is told. Very little of modern art does that – certainly not in the sense that a great work of art can make you wonder how its creation was accomplished by a mere mortal.”
— Stanley Kubrick, 1980 interview with Michel Ciment regarding A Clockwork Orange
“At first glance opera would seem to make impossible demands on the credulity of the spectator. +It presents us with human beings caught up in dramatic situations, who sing to each other instead of speaking. +The reasonable question is (and it was asked most pointedly throughout the history of opera by literary men): +how can an art form based on so unnatural a proceeding be convincing? +The question ignores what must always remain the fundamental aspiration of art: +not to copy nature but to heighten our awareness of it. +True enough, people in real life do not sing to each other. +Neither do they converse in blank verse, as Shakespeare's characters do; nor live in rooms of which one wall is conveniently missing so that the audience may look in. +All the arts employ conventions that are accepted both by the artist and his audience. +The conventions of opera are more in evidence than those in poetry, painting, drama, or film, but they are not different in kind. +Once we have accepted the fact that the carpet can fly, how simple to believe that it is also capable of carrying the prince's luggage.”
— Joseph Machlis, The Enjoyment of Music Fourth Edition, pages 160 through 161
“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, page 46
“At all costs I wanted to avoid whatever is shapeless, irregular, accidental; even in subject matter, I wanted to confine myself within a given frame; I have tried for a concrete, finite presence. A true revelation, it seems to be, will only emerge from stubborn concentration on a single problem. I have nothing in common with experimentalists, adventurers, with those who travel in strange regions. The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object. Suddenly – miraculously – it will look like something we have never seen before.”
— Cesare Pavese, translated by William Arrowsmith; D.S. Carne-Ross, Dialogues with Leucó, Foreword +
“Why did not any of the children in the first group think of this faster method of going across the room? It is simple. They looked at what they were given to use for materials and, they are like all of us, they wanted to use everything. But they did not need everything. They could do better with less, in a different way.”
— Frederik Pohl, The Gold at the Starbow's End, page 29 +
“Attention is the reader's gift to you. That gift is precious. And finite.” … “Once a reader revokes the gift of attention, you don't have a reader anymore. Then you become a writer only in the narrowest sense of the word. Yes, you put words on some pages. But if your reader has disappeared, what was the point? How is your writing more valuable than a random string of characters? Like the proverbial tree falling in the woods, no one's there to notice the difference. Unfortunately, many professional writers adopt a high-risk model of reader attention. Instead of treating reader attention as a precious commodity, they treat it as an unlimited resource. "I'll take as much attention as I need, and if I want more, I'll take that too." Writing as if you have unlimited reader attention is presumptuous, because readers are not doing you a personal favor.” … “I'll even go one better: I believe that most readers are looking for reasons to stop reading. Not because they're malicious or aloof. They're just being rational. Readers have other demands on their time. Why would they pay more attention than they must? Readers are always looking for the exit.”
— Matthew Butterick, Practical Typography, why does typography matter?
“The input problem is technically the least interesting but perhaps emotionally the most important of the problems of converting a system to an international character set.”
— Rob Pike; Ken Thompson, Hello World or Καλημέρα κόσμϵ or こんにちは世界
“The function of a kerning table is to achieve what perfect sidebearings cannot. A thorough check of the kerning table therefore involves checking all feasible permutations of characters: 1213141516 … qwqeqrqtqyquqiqoqpq … (a(s(d(f(g(h(j(k(l … )a)s)d)f)g … -1-2-3-4-5 … TqTwTeTrTtTyTuTiToTp … and so on. This will take several hours for a standard ISO font. For a full pan-European font, it will take several days.”
— Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style Version 3.0, page 203
“Data structures in computer science needn't be homogeneous, and algorithms can involve many different kinds of steps. Sometimes that is a weakness of computer scientists, because we don't try as hard as we should to find uniformity; but sometimes it is a strength because we can deal fluently with concepts that are inherently non-uniform.”
— Donald Knuth, Algorithmic Thinking and Mathematical Thinking, PDF page 13
“UTF-8 was designed, in front of my eyes, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992.”
— Rob Pike, UTF-8 History
“Now I have come to the crossroads in my life. I always knew what the right path was. Without exception, I knew. But I never took it. You know why? It was too. Damned. Hard.”
— The Colonel, exceptionally played by Al Pacino, 1992 film Scent of a Woman, The Decision
“I can make myself happy, then I should be able to do the same for somebody else.”
— Slick Rick in 2010 february 7 interview with Insomniac Magazine
“I'm tired of using vi.”
— Bill Joy, 1984 august interview with Unix Review magazine
“I'm pretty sure the concept of a hidden file was an unintended consequence. It was certainly a mistake. How many bugs and wasted CPU cycles and instances of human frustration (not to mention bad design) have resulted from that one small shortcut about 40 years ago? Keep that in mind next time you want to cut a corner in your code.”
— Rob Pike, 2012 february 8 plus.google.com post
“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propogating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
— Charles Bukowski, Pulp, page 181
“Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
— Edward Snowden, 2015 may 21 reddit comment
“"Of course I cannot understand it," he said. "If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains."”
— Scarecrow in Lyman Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chapter IV
“"I was hired to work on MULTICS. … Bell Labs quit the project when it decided that it wasn't gonna satisfy their needs, and then, I was almost like out of a job. And no real thing to do so I just did what I wanted to do from then on. Games and operating systems … I did some positional astronomy, some audio … absolutely anything that I wanted to do. … That got us into the PDP-7, into really running it. Then on the PDP-7 we wrote the first version of Unix. … We bought a PDP-11, to … the excuse was text processing, but the real reason, was, to, you know, to play more, to play.”
— Ken Thompson, Oral History of Ken Thompson
“And remember, my sentimental friend…that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.”
— Oz in The Wizard of Oz 1939 film, 1 hour 31 minutes 58 seconds
“Free software that people value adds wealth to the world.”
— John Carmack, 2009 februrary interview with Brad Cook
“Even from the outside, a truly beautiful book cannot be a novelty. It must settle for mere perfection instead.”
Jan Tschichold, The Form of the Book, PDF page 27
“It took about two hours in all – 10 minutes to do the sketch and the rest to render it. On my Mac, I could have done the whole thing in a couple of minutes – and with no mistakes. But it would have been much less satisfying when I was finished. And I'd be tempted to fiddle with it endlessly. … The digital world has its place. You can do amazing things in it (like publishing a blog post). But don't spend all your time there. It's not the real world.”
— Mark Simonson, 1979
“Standards, even though they are supposed to be standard, are subject to change.”
— Charles Bigelow; Kris Holmes, The design of a Unicode font, PDF page 13
“If somebody said what advice would I give to a… a young person – they always ask that funny kind of a question. And… and I think one of the things that… is… that I would… that would sort of come first to me is this idea of, don't just believe that because something is trendy, that it's good. I'd probably go the other extreme where if… if something… if I find too many people adopting a certain idea I'd probably think it's wrong or if, you know, if… if my work had become too popular I probably would think I had to change. This is, of course, ridiculous but… but I see the… I see the… the other side of it too… too often where people will… will do something against their own gut instincts because they think the community wants them to do it that way, so people will… will work on a certain… a certain subject even though they aren't terribly interested in it because they think that they'll get more prestige by working on it. I think you get more prestige by doing good science than by doing popular science because… because if… if you go with… with what you really think is… is important then it's a higher chance that it really is important in the long run and it's the long run which… which has the most benefit to the world.”
— Donald Knuth, a section of an interview featuring his advice to young people
“The time has come!”
— Walrus in Alice in Wonderland 1951 film, 19 minutes 54 seconds