Quotes of the week

But what brings us here today is a gentle reminder that when you write code this bad, you can actually kill people.

I'm leaving the DB-dump images in the following quote as a reminder of just how insane this code was. Think of these as skulls on sticks at the edge of the wasteland, saying "Never pass this way again".

It annoys me to no end that I even feel I need to write these down, but apparently I do. So, here are a couple of simple rules to guide your behaviour around here:

1. Do not call other developers nor users idiots nor other derogatory terms on the mailing list.

2. Do not use Twitter or other public broadcasting systems to call other developers or users idiots or other derogatory terms.

That's all, pretty simple actually. Most well-adjusted people would not stand up in a crowd of people and start calling people around them idiots. Just because there is a monitor and a network cable separating you from the crowd doesn't make it ok, and I am tired of it.

People *state* that it would be good to have more Parrot developers on Windows, but they really would like those developers to be *somebody else*...

Our mantra: "Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at all dynamic languages." The reality: "Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at all dynamic languages, provided you're on Linux."

Reality showed us that the balance of maintaining the code of other OSs in the main repository is much more work than the work the few lines of useful code the few people of the other OSs contribute. We tried with many projects in the past, and decided against it. The needed abstractions are just hard to manage and get into our way all the time.

The only really thinkable solution for the niche OSs is to port the needed Linux interfaces to their kernels. But I guess that will never happen, and so systemd, udev, ... will probably never happen for them.