Great description of burnout: "What I learned is that burning out isn’t just about work load, it’s about work load being greater than the motivation to do work."

OK, so all LaTeX documents will have to be rewritten in pure TeX, because using an extra translation layer produces substandard results.

LaTeX to be renamed iLaTeX, and Knuth will be creating a group to approve articles written in it, to make sure they don't tarnish its image in any way.

I'm surprised that no-one has suggested the obvious: that The Art Of Computer Programming Vol. 4 - Combinatorial Algorithms is complete.

But that's no fun, so I hope it's something truly earth shattering, like Knuth getting an e-mail address.

I'm hoping he's discovered if P=NP.

It actually is the de-facto-standard modeling engine in a lot of areas, even some scientific areas, but mainly economics/finance. There are some pretty nuttily complex simulations written entirely in Excel, with the visualization part of the simulation done by popping up a chart--- you can even make it animated by popping up a new chart at a certain time interval. There's even a market in commercial spreadsheets, which you buy and load sort of like libraries: http://www.palisade.com/RISK/

Not necessarily a good idea, but somehow it caught on. One possible reason is that it was one of the earlier widely available pieces of software for doing declarative, dependency-based modeling that auto-propagates updates: if box A and box B are linked by a "B = 2*A", then B auto-updates whenever A changes, without you manually writing a propagate-updates loop. You can now do stuff like that in a lot of languages, but it's relatively recent (e.g., it's one of the new features JavaFX variables have).

This article is, frankly, childish. Apple was a fading platform when Adobe made that decision, and it made perfect business sense.

Until about 2008, the last time I had even seen a Mac on this (Eastern) side of the Atlantic was about 1991 or so.

I respect what Ryan's trying to do here, and understand the frustration that is almost unavoidable when working on a community-driven open source project with a large number of users.

But at the same time, I'm frustrated. I've found bugs, worked around them, written up an incredibly detailed description of one. I wrote a patch, wrote tests for the patch, and mentioned that I was a first-time contributor and wanted to do it right. After a few positive comments, a member of Rails core came along, made a dismissive comment, and left.

If you're going to write blog posts calling community members "useless, pathetic bastards", you darn well better make sure that the community is one that welcomes patches, encourages positive discussion, and if the patches or contributions are inappropriate/applied at the wrong level of abstraction - work to get it there.

Otherwise, you'll end up with a community of users that maintain their own local patches, forking the core or components of it because the mental overhead of sponsoring a patch and pushing it through takes weeks, while just Getting it Done is a couple lines of code and push to your repo. Which is (sadly), kind of where I'm at.

I love Rails. I like many of the principles it rests on, and I love the flexibility it offers. I've learned at least half of what I know about software development and engineering while programming Ruby. But when it comes to dropping writing elegant code so that I can spend hours hammering through endless gut-wrenching arguments on a Lighthouse ticket - count me out.

This is definitely one of those discussions that usually doesn't end well on internet forums, and that doesn't really seem germane to HN.

The author's first two articles on Dubai:

http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N16/dubai.html

http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N17/dubai.html