TOWM Salutes Eric S. Raymond

Since I am a latecommer to hacking, I have only just today discovered the existence of Eric S. Raymond. I found him through a random link on the INTERCAL programming language (for anyone who doesn't know about INTERCAL, the best introduction to INTERCAL - and anything ever, really - is here). Well, in addition to maintaining that gem of a programming language, he also turns out to be essentially the founder of the open source movement and A HARDCORE LIBERTARIAN!!! His pages on Second Amendment Rights are some of the best I've seen actually.

He's also a fan of science fiction and roleplaying games, though that's pretty much par for the course with computer geeks, I guess.

Anyway - I didn't mean to waste today's blog entry on singing someone else's praises, but I'm that kinda goofy happy mood you get in when you stumble across someone who thinks pretty much exactly like you do. I can't find any evidence that he likes cats, though. And he's not only a USER of the Dark Editor but also one of its DEVELOPERS. UGH!!! So there are some salient differences. But we don't hang people for using Emacs. (String them up, maybe, but cut the rope before it gets fatal.) Now, if he turns out to be a Java guru...

In parting, I just want to recommend this absolute ace of an essay he wrote on affirmative action. OK, so it's a bit dated - from the days when people were first discovering that Affirmative Action was a scam. But nostalgia's a bitch and I'm it's frequent victim. Enjoy.