Over the past couple of weeks I’ve seen a handful of “Why Golang Sucks” articles. A couple were reasoned, the rest were copy-cat, none of them make any sense to me.

It would be easy to get the impression from pop-software news that the last line of C was written about 5 or 6 years back, and the last small band of C++ programmers are holed up in a cave someplace metaprogramming. I can assure you, this is not the case. If nothing else, one need only consult the sources for the various language-of-the-month compilers, or maybe the source debs for the last 100 or so updates applied to your Ubuntu machine.

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Julia Evan’s article on becoming a kernel hacker reminds me of the the early 90s, when earnest young hackers dutifully ftp’d down the latest Linux kernel patch file and excitedly ran make config to see what new stuff had been added, the rebooted immediately to check out the new uname sweetness.

Rarely was there any real reason for this other than bragging rights on IRC, although occasionally there would be some excitement when a previously unsupported sound card showed up as supported. Mostly it was just enthusiasm, for running one’s own server, making one’s own choices about how the machine would be maintained. We’d all been living under the unspeakable tyranny of root on the university shared UNIX machine, so this kind of freedom was a big deal.

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I’m a little unusual in the software development profession in that I have a “serious” side hobby. I play an instrument in what you’d probably call a semi-professional capacity. On a good year I probably play 20-30 gigs, play on a record or two, and make a couple thousand bucks (then squander all of it on instruments).

I’m not in it for the money; I’d starve to death if I was. I got a huge thrill out of playing in front of audiences in the beginning, and still do when they’re gracious. Playing in clubs is usually a pain in the ass though, so the joy in playing now comes from being able to impress people I respect with my playing and having them call me back for gigs.

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I enjoyed reading an article from a fellow named Ben Northrop. About 90% of the posts I find by way Hacker News, et al, are crap; in a roundabout way that’s actually the topic of this post.

I am vastly more cynical than Mr. Northrop. I stormed through his essay and was annoyed that the programmer motivation I’d been spending the past few months thinking about was missing from his diagram. I stewed overnight, ruminating about my own post, the re-read Ben’s post, and realized my mistake.

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In the past, passing –without-x-toolkit to the configure script for emacs was sufficient to get it to omit window system support from the build. Maybe this still works elsewhere but on my new work box running Wheezy, I still get a build with X. This works though:

./configure --prefix=$HOME \
    --with-xpm=no \
    --with-jpeg=no \
    --with-png=no \
    --with-tiff=no \
    --with-gif=no \
    --with-x-toolkit=no \
    --without-x

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I used to keep a blog where I would write a combination of stories I thought were funny, along with occasional long rambling pieces about politics or technology. After doing this for a few years I realized I’m ok at writing funny stories, but that when I wrote about politics or technology it was boring as ass to read, mostly because I tried to make it sound like I was some kind of expert on politics or history. I labored under the fantasy that impressionable people would wander across these posts and be moved by them in some way. In reality, the readers were almost all friends of mine. They already knew how I felt about stuff. They liked my funny stories and would endure the other stuff.

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