Do you have the same expectations from every software project? Linux? Python? Chrome? Microsoft Office?

Yes, actually... but I suppose I'm particularly critical of projects that have been running for 40 years and are still asking for money.

That's awesome! Thank you very much!

Actually the announcement is by the Free Software Foundation Europe, an organization that empowers users to control technology.

Actually OP is about the Free Software Foundation Europe, an organization that empowers users to control technology.

A number of their campaigns have direct policy/political goals: Public Money Public Code, Device Neutrality, etc.

Interesting!

Back in the '80s, before AI could quickly produce such things, I had created a "Greek" version of the C language -- obviously named "Γ".

A lot of preprocessor definitions were involved for keyword translation, as one can imagine. Translating the C standard library was a much more difficult process: it involved patching the compiler/linker on a BSD system, since you could not have non-ASCII symbols (function entry points).

Wow! That sounds amazing. I did experiment with using non latin characters for conventions like mu but I think I ran into some suprising rough edges working with claude that made me abandon it, forget what exactly they were though.

Working in C is such a breath of fresh air compared to typescript, go, etc. I love having pure text substitution macros.

Another difference, not mentioned in the article or the comments till now, is the effort required for producing a legally compliant software distribution.

All's well with using FOSS libraries, but the licenses have to be respected. So you have to collect license information and comply with the license terms. For GPL and LGPL licensed components, one had to make the complete corresponding source code available. For permissively licensed components, one usually has to provide the copyright notices.

Including the whole Chromium (as in the case of Electron) does not make this easy. Creating a Tauri-based legally compliant distribution is much less effort.

Right. The title of this submission should have a "(2015)".

I used to refer to this as "MUP", for "Most Useless Problem". I wonder if there has ever been any use for it, anywhere.

Oh, what memories!

I spent a serious amount of time on this when I discovered it, a couple of years after it was published.

Firmly believing that "variations on a theme is the crux of creativity", I studied what happens to the same construct in other numbering bases. Well, not many: based on the first theorem, only unary, binary and ternary were interesting.

I should unearth the report I wrote back then -- although I have no idea where a digital copy might be stored.

It's interesting to see that the "the diversity of environments" section only talks about work for supporting different installation / deployment methods.

Back in the day, with different technologies, most of it would have been "strange compilers and environments" that had to be supported.