I'm talking about creating a package manager from scratch (I'm not proposing every package manager break their users in a post about not breaking your users) for some hypothetical next big language, and in that situation it seems worth fixing even if it's not that big a deal.

Versioning is not the problem with package managers. It's entirely possible to implement a package manager that makes the right choices without changing how we version things. Cargo (Rust's package manager) does just that. That's why I don't think it's necessary to discuss versioning in an article about building a better package manager.

If this was the only sentence-level criticism you could make I'm not doing so bad :) Notice that I said "non-trivial", not "hard".

Nothing interesting is trivial. That's almost tautological. Calling something out for being non-trivial is either meaningless or equivalent to calling it hard[er than it should be]. In fact, You don't actually need to make the versioning argument at all. I think you can make the exact same point made in the 3 paragraphs following my quote with the following single sentence:

"By making the major version number part of the package name and combining the minor and patch numbers, we get a versioning system where the user is forced to pick a major version and can expect to always use the latest patch to that version".

There are practical reasons why I disagree with the sentence above, but I think it does a pretty good job of making the same point you made in your article in less than half as many words.

Is your argument that we should give up and use one specific version of each library/package, and manually update the library/package version every so often? I can get behind that for offline software, but for anything exposed to the internet, the possibility of missing security fixes makes me leery of a purely manual update process.

I am a programmer, and I have to agree. The current scheme of dotted numbers works just fine. Everything mentioned in this post falls into two categories.

1) Package managers should be better at automatically figuring out what version I want.

2) Version strings are should be easier to parse.

(1) is a fair complaint. It's certainly possible to build a better package manager, but you don't need to mess with versioning to do it. (2) is really just arguing semantics. I personally disagree with akkartik, but it's a fundamentally subjective argument.

"3.0.2" is hard to parse? Are you serious?

This reads like a complaint about the state of package managers, not a convincing argument against common versioning schemes.

I really think you should break this up into two posts. Package managers have nothing to do with versioning. At a fundamental level, any package manager can be adapted to work with any proposed versioning scheme. Likewise, versioning isn't just a feature of package managers. The software I write for my job has version numbers, even though it isn't distributed through any package manager.

Should Walmart (or any other company) do something different? Your comment reads to me as if you believe that Walmart should keep stores open even as they are losing money, which seems totally nonsensical to me.

This is weird, because I have a sort of similar reaction, but at a much lower intensity. The self-serve McDonalds machines were slow, but comprehensible to me. Likewise, self-checkout is occasionally frustrating, but generally much faster than waiting for a human cashier in my experience.

In light of the two tweets quoted in the article, I am curious what others think is going on here.

1. Both posts are Gingrich's honest belief at the time they were posted.

2. The first is an honest opinion, the second is a political opinion.

3. The second is honest, the first is political.

4. Both are political positions

5. Other?

The first just seems implausible to me on the basis that no one changes opinions so drastically so fast. If it's the second, third, or fourth, then who would bother reading Twitter posts and ascribing any meaning to them? Surely the only value in reading an individual Republican's Twitter lies in the idea that they do something other thsn parrot Republican talking points?

Surely you mean "a art, so"?

"Trolling is a fishing-derived term that basically means browsing/searching in common English. After thinking about it for a moment, I'm not sure whether the internet-common term derives from a verbification of the noun "troll", a copting of the fishing term, or a combination of the two.

2-5 per day? That sounds amazingly high to me. I don't think I find 2-5 things per month that meet your description. As an example, in a week where I particularly care about the music I listen to (which isn't most weeks), I would consider myself lucky to find a couple songs I like. "Like" seems a much lower bar to me than "become friends with".

What I'm getting at is, I can't tell if we are viewing similar experiences through different perceptual lenses or if we really have vastly different experiences of day to day life.

The yearning resonates with me, but the loss expressed in your third paragraph resonates with me more. It was wonderfully fun to be a young person with no virtually no preconceived world views. Everything was up for debate, and that made it possible to spin elaborate all-connecting webs. But, as I get on in life, I find myself accumulating ideas about how the world works that I believe are rational and correct, but also close doors that, in their closing cut off pieces of that all-connecting web.

Definitely not related to anything that happened in Syria this week. Deactivating and entire BCT is a huge, years long, undertaking.

I find this fascinating because I'm the opposite. My first list is very much long term directions I want to go, but my second list seems to consist of entirely too much video games and beer drinking time. I suppose it's a good thing that I'm somewhat aware of the second list at all, but I continually live with the feeling that if I really wanted the things on the first list I would study more and play less.

I was the last high school class that had shop class. The last to have a World History requirement. The last to have mechanical typing class as a part of the graduating requirements (they removed the typing classes and offered computers as an elective the year after I graduated).

I have no idea how old you are... I had shop class and had to take World History, but I'm too young to have ever even used a typewriter. Hell, I'm not sure I've ever seen a mechanical typewriter in real life.

I think this just about sums up my feelings:

That is if you disregard the command line, which obviously is better on Linux

Are you comparing bash to cmd? zsh to Powershell?

Since I took the time to learn Powershell, I have found the command line experience on Windows and Linux to be largely equivalent. Powershell even aliases a large number of sh style commands, so much so that I only really know how to do things on the command line in "*nix style".

So, one thing I noticed during the stream is that they talk about multiple "fueling" trips per crewed vehicle, but you would think that an unmanned fuel transporter would be able to fully fuel a manned vehicle of the same basic design in one trip. That, coupled with the fact that I find it hard to believe that Musk has forgotten to account for the water requirements of an Earth-Mars trip make me think that maybe there are some pretty significant engineering details that have been considered, but where glossed over for the sake of keeping the talk accessible.

I didn't make it past the second question in the Q&A... Did I missing anything interesting?

Weird. I haven't touched No Man's Sky yet because every review I read of it says that the mechanics in the released product are so simple that I the game would get boring long before I'm ready to stop playing it. I didn't see anyone complaining about the lack of multiplayer.