# Which operating system forum or programming languages do you regulary read.



## Alain De Vos (Jun 6, 2021)

Except freebsd forum. Which fora are of your interest. Could be a programming language. A method of programming. Or an operating system. Or a certain syntax. You regulary watch.

For instance I look at dlang forum,








						Index
					

D Programming Language Forum




					forum.dlang.org
				




Or for fun,





						Linux Hardware Reviews & Performance Benchmarks, Open-Source News - Phoronix
					






					www.phoronix.com


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## a6h (Jun 6, 2021)

`I...` DAW: KVR Audio | _I'm active over there, but with different handle._
`II..` FASM : flat assembler | _I used to. Not anymore. I quit using fasm._
`III.` OS: OSDev.org | _Just reading for fun._
`IV..` perl: PerlMonks | _I used to be active with different handle, Not anymore. Still reading._
`V...` OpenBSD: OpenBSD Mailing Lists | _Recentely. Just reading._


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## shkhln (Jun 6, 2021)

None, obviously.


Alain De Vos said:


> fora


Oh, please, you don't sound smarter that way.


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## Beastie7 (Jun 6, 2021)

Unix, C/C++, POLA

I mean, is this really a question?


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 6, 2021)

Fora: plural form of forum
Forum : open public space within a Roman city


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## mtu (Jun 6, 2021)

Not really a forum, more of an oldschool type of news site with a lively comments scene (like Slashdot or Hackernews): *lwn.net*


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 18, 2021)

*Reddit*

<https://old.reddit.com/r/freebsd/new/>

I nearly always link to _old_, because _new_ (the default for _www_) can cause things to be overlooked. 

*Element*

FreeBSD-oriented rooms include:

FreeBSD <https://matrix.to/#/!IBdGSejslGivmIcnQs:matrix.org?via=matrix.org&via=kde.org&via=halogen.city>
#freebsd-bugs <https://matrix.to/#/!xzmizAyHgneiBlCGTj:libera.chat?via=libera.chat&via=matrix.org>
#freebsd-desktop <https://matrix.to/#/!KYWCpFvqYdeGYJdkxS:libera.chat?via=libera.chat&via=matrix.org&via=kde.org> – #kde-freebsd people (and others) are now here
#freebsd-vbox <https://matrix.to/#/!KDgOyFepgkpFZnoYJx:libera.chat?via=libera.chat&via=matrix.org>
Others include: 

vbox <https://matrix.to/#/!vvWYgdrmvQfHZsYrMv:matrix.org?via=matrix.org>

*Discord*

FreeBSD rooms include: 

community <https://discord.com/channels/727023752348434432/757543661058654269>
desktop <https://discord.com/channels/727023752348434432/831066226074976267>
helpdesk <https://discord.com/channels/727023752348434432/760416312676712519>
storage <https://discord.com/channels/727023752348434432/757305697527398481>
virtualization <https://discord.com/channels/727023752348434432/772291931433730048>
*GhostBSD forums*

*VirtualBox forums*

*Forums @ AskWoody*

Truthfully: I'm not a _regular_ reader, but it's a nice place; worth mentioning.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 18, 2021)

grahamperrin said:


> Reddit


80% of all users  are kids under 18 years old with no work experience or knowledge of the subject. 80% of the rest are incompetent boobs sitting in their Mom's basement typing nasty responses while watching porn.

Never, EVER use reddit as a reference for ANYTHING. (And I'm being nice.)


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 18, 2021)

There are interesting technical threads on reddit if one filters while watching porn.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 18, 2021)

Over the last year I've noticed that I no longer visit any of the forums or boards or read blogs and generally don't read anything posted online. This forum is about as social as I get. I'm falling back into where I started years ago and only reading documentation that relates directly to what I'm working on. If anything, I might Google for a solution or answer to a question but, beyond that, not bothering with these mostly social platforms has freed my mind to concentrate on the task at hand when I don't concern myself with the opinions of anonymous posters whose information needs to be verified by other anonymous posters or through my own work. Invariably, my own work is the only real solution anyway so I just stick to that.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 18, 2021)

> … Never, EVER use reddit as a reference for ANYTHING. (And I'm being nice.)



All things considered, I find it nicer there – in /r/freebsd – than here.

YMMV but if a person is so opposed to Reddit, it's highly unlikely that the person will ever begin to realise the niceness.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 18, 2021)

grahamperrin said:


> YMMV but if a person is so opposed to Reddit, it's highly unlikely that the person will ever begin to realise the niceness.


I haven't been there in years because I realized there is no such thing as niceness there. 

Actually, the FreeBSD sub was one of the better ones but can't release itself from the random idiots that always post into every question at one time or another--sometimes months after the initial thread is started. It was always a vast waste of time and the only time I've been there is when someone linked me to it.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 18, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> … random idiots that always post into every question at one time or another--sometimes months after the initial thread is started. …



Maybe before my time, but that's now very far from the truth. 

I occasionally use Never Ending Reddit (with Reddit Enhancement Suite) to bring five hundred posts into sight. If people truly behaved in the manner that you describe, it would be glaringly obvious. 



> … was always a vast waste of time …



If ever it was, it is no longer.



> … no such thing as niceness there. …



Imagine such things being read by people from /r/freebsd who have not yet joined FreeBSD Forums.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 18, 2021)

grahamperrin said:


> people from /r/freebsd who have not yet joined FreeBSD Forums.


For which I am totally grateful. 

Some time back, there was a post over there that sent a swarm of them to this forum which made a backlog of threads and posts that were quickly dismissed by users here or removed by the mods. 

Maybe I should go visit to see what's going on now .... nah. Wasted effort. Waste of time. I value my IQ.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 18, 2021)

It never helps to tar everyone with the same brush.



> … Some time back, there was a post over there …



Does anyone have a link?


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## shkhln (Jun 18, 2021)

grahamperrin said:


> All things considered, I find it nicer there – in /r/freebsd – than here.


Reddit makes it too easy for Linux users (and other casuals) to chime in, they are trying to be helpful alright, but they typically don't have any FreeBSD knowledge, which make /r/freebsd a completely hopeless place for any desktop questions. And for server/programming questions there are mailing lists, IRC, and, to some extent, Discord. Ultimately it's only useful for news and announcements, not for questions. Especially not for support questions.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 18, 2021)

> … /r/freebsd a completely hopeless place for any desktop questions. … Ultimately it's only useful for news and project announcements, not for questions. Especially not for support questions.



Whoa. You're not describing the /r/freebsd that I know. There's a more than good balance.

<https://old.reddit.com/comments/l0g4zl/-/gjuf5dn/?context=1> a Linux bod politely corrects someone who's (justifiably) famed for expertise with FreeBSD; there's a polite thank-you.

I was perfectly satisfied with answers to FreeBSD virtualised on Windows 10 – or Windows 10 virtualised on FreeBSD (archived).

More recent <https://old.reddit.com/comments/mp9x6d/-/gucas2v/> helped me to discover a relevant bug, one that is (incidentally) sort-of show-stopping to my use of FreeBSD on a restricted access network.

And so on.


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## bobmc (Jun 19, 2021)

Alain De Vos said:


> Could be a programming language


Rust .. system programming language


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 19, 2021)

grahamperrin said:


> I was perfectly satisfied with answers to...


For every one good reply I could find a hundred bad ones. 

NPR (National Public Radio in the US) called Reddit, "A Frankenstein's monster even they can't control."


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 19, 2021)

bobmc said:


> Rust .. system programming language


The flavor of the week.

Sing with me:
Anything Rust can do, C can do better.
I can do anything better with C.

Actually, when rust first came out, I saw some nice things about it. I just never found a reason to use it. When I find a few minutes to read about it, it's like learning a foreign language for the sake of learning it when there is no need or interest otherwise. And I quickly forget about it.


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## bakul (Jun 19, 2021)

I used to check out lambda-the-ultimate.org for PL though it seems to be mostly quiet. Interesting discussions and references to papers. I keep an eye on new languages by checking their forums etc. E.g. nim, V, Julia, K etc. I never took a shine to Rust! I currently like V and should write some non-trivial programs in it to get a feel for it (IMHO this is the only way to really learn a PL -- until then you don't really know what things are easy to express, what are hard and what are some gotchas in the language). The main issue I have with newish PLs is that they all play in the same playground and not very innovative.

On OSes, I mostly check out papers these days. In the old days Usenet groups were good. If I hear about something new OS related I google and find related papers. I scan hackernews at least once a day as there are links to interesting articles and some discussions are good.

Though one has to wade through more and more of low quality/wrong/fluffy stuff before you find something good. We need a data "centrifuge" to separate the wheat from the chaff! IMHO there is still space for a "curated" internet.


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 19, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> For every one good reply I could find a hundred bad ones.
> 
> NPR (National Public Radio in the US) called Reddit, "A Frankenstein's monster even they can't control."


You have to read diagonal , try to locate some words, certainly not really read, skip the 99 bad ones, and read the 1 good one.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 19, 2021)

> For every one good reply I could find a hundred bad ones.



If exaggeration is the order of the day: for every one good post in FreeBSD Forums (posts within topics) I could find a hundred bad ones.



> NPR (National Public Radio in the US) called Reddit, "A Frankenstein's monster even they can't control."



Reddit can be monstrous. /r/freebsd is never so monstrous. It's terribly wrong to conflate in this way.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 19, 2021)

Alain De Vos said:


> skip the 99 bad ones, and read the 1 good one.


Thus the problem with reddit.

Another issue is the people who read the 99 and build their knowledge based on those. Then come here and spout that nonsense.

And how is one to tell which of the 100 is the sensible one?


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## kpedersen (Jun 19, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Actually, when rust first came out, I saw some nice things about it.


I think the language is great. Finally a "safe" C++. However I get up to the "Node Package Repository" style crates.io dependency system in the official book and realize it isn't going to be sustainable. Instantly lose interest.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 20, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> … a redditor and I fart in your general direction. …



I do like references to Monty Python, but the obsession with Reddit is a concern.



drhowarddrfine said:


> … I don't think I've looked at the place in five years or more …



Are five years not enough to begin getting over things?



drhowarddrfine said:


> I would always look at any reference to something on reddit with a jaundiced eye and tend to violently vomit after viewing such things. Never, EVER trust anything from reddit.



It's unusual for a divorcee to be so repeatedly spiteful so long after a divorce; and it's debatably bad form to bitch about an entire family, if one or two people _alone_ caused offence.

*Show me*, on the dolly, where Reddit touched you.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 20, 2021)

grahamperrin said:


> the obsession with Reddit is a concern.


It's not an obsession despite the recent references. I never think of the place in my daily life or mention it till someone else does. Fortunately, I've gone years without seeing it referenced on this forum which is what makes this place so peaceful and educated.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 20, 2021)

… and, there's yet _another_ dig. Any more? Would you like to get it all out of your system, once and for all?


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## Hakaba (Jun 20, 2021)

I read suckless website.
I watch iBSD on YouTube (I can not follow because I don't have Google account.)



drhowarddrfine said:


> 80% of all users  are kids under 18 years old with no work experience or knowledge of the subject. 80% of the rest are incompetent boobs sitting in their Mom's basement typing nasty responses while watching porn.


This let more interesting post than in a pub... The missing beer is maybe the reason.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 20, 2021)

grahamperrin I'm only responding to your posts directed at me. If you don't want a response, don't ask me questions or respond to my posts.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 20, 2021)

Hakaba said:


> … The missing beer is maybe the reason.



Maybe, although I'm more a gin person. 

The majority of Reddit users have either some college education or a degree, I'm happy to be tarred with this brush. Not as happy as when I'm drunk but hey, for now I'm tipsy with glee with the sentiment that /r/freebsd is amongst the better subreddits. It doesn't make me more educated, but if /r/freebsd places me in better-educated company than the majority of Reddit users, I'm satisfied.


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## decuser (Jun 20, 2021)

shkhln said:


> None, obviously.
> 
> Oh, please, you don't sound smarter that way.


Smarter than me, I just skipped it and figured it was a misspelled word until you pointed it out.


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## decuser (Jun 20, 2021)

List of stuff:

https://forums.freebsd.org - but seriously, my favorite forum
https://distrowatch.com/ - It keeps me up to date on most releases Linux and BSD
https://www.osnews.com/ - habit, but used to have all of the best alternative os news - these days 1/2 left wing political rant 1/2 tech news

As for programming languages:
Don't read them, but use them all the time: C, Python, Perl.
Can't stand them, but use them quite a bit: C++, C#
Like 'em but don't use 'em much anymore: Java, Ruby, PHP, ASM, BASIC
Learned them, but couldn't find much practical use for them: Lisp, Scheme
All time favorites: C, Perl, BASIC, Ruby


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## Sevendogsbsd (Jun 24, 2021)

I used to frequent linuxquestions.org but haven't been there in months because there are too many a$$hats acting like jerks. Some folks are OK but many are not so to me, it was a toxic environment and I chose not to hang out there. Other than that, this forum is the only one I ever visit.


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 24, 2021)

It is a bit vague a$$hats acting like jerks. Toxic envrironment. Is it possible to mention an anecdote you have read ? So I can understand what you mean ?


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## Sevendogsbsd (Jun 24, 2021)

Sorry, that was English slang and probably not appropriate. I mean some of the answers are not friendly and many of them are dismissive. When people try to answer a question, some members berate them or dismiss the answers, creating an environment where people don't want to even ask questions. It's the electronic equivalent of an argument, if that makes sense. I did not think it was a friendly place.


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 24, 2021)

This one is a good one,




_View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDyhucbFI6o_


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## astyle (Jun 24, 2021)

Has anyone seen the movie, "Internet's own boy"? It's about Reddit's founder, he also is the guy who came up with the RSS idea... 

But as for usability, I agree, reddit can be frustrating to dig through for usable information. If reddit is like street-level market noise, then FreeBSD forums are more like 'College on a hilltop'. Yeah, a college will occasionally have some bad apples who never learned to actually behave, but on average, the college-educated population tends to be polite company (as opposed to street-level market). Same with FreeBSD forums - we do have some bad apples, some people who could benefit from learning about FreeBSD or forum etiquette, but on average, it's easier to find useful info on FreeBSD forums than on reddit. This is at least in part thanks to mods who do put in more effort to moderate than what I see on reddit.


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 24, 2021)

I find the report button in the forum funny. Mainly because i have never to reported something or I probably never will, nor will i probably ever need to report. I know forums where the report button is misused by rotten apples. Not here.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 25, 2021)

astyle said:


> … mods who do put in more effort to moderate than what I see on reddit.



https://old.reddit.com/r/freebsd/about/moderators just one moderator. Two, maybe three conversations with me – about sidebar content (not about any person).

This, for example:






If a person bothers me enough, I'll ignore or block.

Two people ignored here in FreeBSD Forums.

Of the few people blocked at Reddit (a much larger place), I recognise only one name, I blocked him around a month ago for being unnecessarily disruptive (more towards other people, than towards me). It's hard to tell, with forgotten names, but I guess that three of the blocked people were /r/freebsd participants.


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 25, 2021)

It must be said this forum has mature moderators.
Dutchdaemon and Sirdice are doing a great job.


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 25, 2021)

A drawback of rust is that the description is large. So it more for bigger projects.
For something small i first try ruby, then python and then Dlang.
Ada is not a bad language when you don't need object-orientation. Because that is ugly.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 25, 2021)

astyle That's similar to something I said years ago. Completely agree.

I'll never forget the time I got fed up over there and said to someone, "What are you? Fifteen?" To which he replied, "I'm turning 16 tomorrow!". After that, I started asking people their age and found out the majority in the subs I was getting frustrated with, at that time, were kids under 20 years old.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 25, 2021)

astyle said:


> … reddit can be frustrating to dig through …



Search engines are our friends. 

<https://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/+expression&tbs=li:1#unfucked> and so on.

As far as I can tell, Reddit search is simply not designed to seek comments, which I hate, but hating does not change a site with something like fifty-two million daily active users. In any case: if comments (from so many users) were publicy indexed by Reddit, then search results _there_ could become worse.

ELI5: Why is reddit's search engine so bad : explainlikeimfive


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 25, 2021)

Once we were all under 20. And sometimes I which i would be under 20.
But as as former teacher i know we can have very productive conversations with younger persons.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 25, 2021)

drhowarddrfine said:


> … the majority in the subs I was getting frustrated with, at that time, were kids under 20 years old. …



On the other hand, _users between 30–49 also represent a significant chunk (40%) of the Reddit audience_.


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## astyle (Jun 25, 2021)

Alain De Vos said:


> But as as former teacher i know we can have very productive conversations with younger persons.


Well, you still gotta do your "Think before you speak" thing, and set a positive example with that. And yeah, it's on you to do that, and steer the conversation to where you want it to go - otherwise you'll end up with something like a reddit thread.

Oh, and responding to the topic of this thread - I do read Phoronix, a bit of Distrowatch. I used to read ZDNet and extract interesting tech news from that (ZDNet is where I learned about an obscure embedded OS by Google - Fuschia). But recently, ZDNet has not been that interesting for me... too much news about corporate acquisitions, large-scale stuff (that usually turns out to be snake oil), and work culture, even if the focus is tech companies.


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## Alain De Vos (Jun 25, 2021)

Now that I became older, i think less before I speak. Strange, but not bad. I call it a rise in assertivity.


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## grahamperrin@ (Jun 25, 2021)

astyle said:


> … ZDNet …



Years ago I subscribed, via e-mail, to content by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols <https://www.zdnet.com/meet-the-team/us/steven-j-vaughan-nichols/>. I can't recall what drove me to subscribe but I still click through to some of what he posts.

Close to home, this 2012 series of twelve articles was memorable: SharePoint 2010: A migration odyssey | ZDNet … the links from one article to the next are now broken, if anyone's interested I can share a working set of bookmarks (away from this topic). 

I'm no longer with Brighton Business School, but one of the current researchers spent around six years (mostly in the 1990s) with Ziff-Davis/ZDNet. Things then were … _quite different_


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 25, 2021)

I only go to Hacker News and see what the headlines are. If it doesn't apply to me (and the vast majority doesn't) I move on. I don't even look at the comments except if I'm unsure of the importance of the link and want to see what others are saying.

I've found, over the years, that almost everything I read online has nothing to do with me. It doesn't affect me. I don't care. And all that is probably true for you, too, if you think about it. I come to this forum because it's specific to what I use for work.

The social angle here is better than anywhere else I go except when I used to belong to a professional cinematographer's forum (an entirely different side of me you don't know about). It was about the same way there as this place except we had to use our real names to join (and, yes, they checked you out).


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jun 25, 2021)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> I used to frequent linuxquestions.org but haven't been there in months because there are too many a$$hats acting like jerks. Some folks are OK but many are not so to me, it was a toxic environment and I chose not to hang out there.


I put a few of them in the box and now it's a much nicer place for me. The Ignore box, that is. Where people cease to exist as long as I log in before i view the forums.

When someone made the cute remark that "arrogance was a desirable personality attribute" I gave them a lesson it. And when I was done told them to get in the box, just so I wouldn't feel like coming back in 3 months and doing it again.

It's the only other forum I frequent beside this one.

I have been banished from the Bizarro World A.I. Forum for the ThoughtCrime of Logic, and putting Kuki/Mitsuku in an Infinite Loop during a Turing Test.

Today I noticed I've got a shortened Twitter URL (https://t.co/ is the generic link) because it could possibly be dangerous to visit Demonica's site. Now Twitter people are coming to see the transcript of Demonica and Kuki/Mitsuku in conversation...


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jun 27, 2021)

sevendogbsd, it's a lesson I find myself teaching more than once and sometime I hold Class there on Saturdays.


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## baaz (Dec 9, 2021)

it's a program I know but it has some of the nicest developers in the world Synfig


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## grahamperrin@ (Dec 18, 2021)

grahamperrin said:


> *Discord*
> 
> FreeBSD rooms include: …





jbodenmann said:


> Can't access that without a discord account apparently. …



Oh, that's a PITA. jbodenmann sorry, I never realised.

I wish they'd gone for a less exclusive, less proprietary approach to chat 

Matrix should have been ideal. <https://matrix.to/> for easy access to logged content, and so on. Too late now


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## hruodr (Dec 18, 2021)

Only in: comp.lang.tcl

A nice place and good help when programming with tcl/tk. 
But unfortunately not anymore so frequented.


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## bakul (Dec 18, 2021)

See some of the blog entry observations here on reading the Coders At Work book. Several remarkable quotes:


> [How do you decide when code needs to be thrown away?] When it’s hard to work on. I do it much quicker than most people do. I’ll throw away code as soon I want to add something to it and I get the feeling that what I have to do to add it is too hard. —Ken Thompson





> Most of the time, [the project] sits in the back of my mind—nothing on paper—for a period of time and I’ll concentrate on the hard parts. —Ken Thompson





> I usually write down data structures before I write down code. —Ken Thompson





> Chris Okasaki’s book Purely Functional Data Structures. Fantastic. It’s like Arthur Norman’s course only spread out to a whole book. —Simon Peyton Jones





> You can go in and read the source to Linux, if you want to. Reading the source to TeX was a valuable exercise just because it was a large body of well-thought-out, well-debugged code. —Guy Steele





> you want to design the specification of what’s in the middle in such a way that it naturally is also correct on the boundaries, rather than treating boundaries as special cases. —Guy Steele





> Joe’s Law of Debugging, which is that all errors will be plus/minus three statements of the place you last changed the program. —Joe Armstrong





> There’s this overemphasis on reusable software where you never get to open up the box and see what’s inside the box. It’s nice to have these black boxes but, almost always, if you can look inside the box you can improve it and make it work better once you know what’s inside the box. Instead people make these closed wrappers around everything and present the closure to the programmers of the world, and the programmers of the world aren’t allowed to diddle with that. —Donald Knuth



Though none of this matters if you don't develop & practice your own set of programming habits, your own code of conduct for the conduct of your code!


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## grahamperrin@ (Feb 10, 2022)

astyle said:


> … reddit can be frustrating to dig through for usable information. …



Try Reddit Search. 

(It went live more than nineteen months ago. I didn't discover it until eleven days ago (via an /r/zfs post that was made two months ago).)


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## Zvoni (Feb 10, 2022)

20 years of VB6/VBA: https://www.vbforums.com
Lazarus/FreePascal: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/


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## rorgoroth (Feb 10, 2022)

Pretty much only forums for things I use, so related to OS's:
Arch, Gentoo for the past 15 years or so.
I also read the Phoronix forums and visit hacker news although I don't really read comments on HN.
Been using 4ch /g/ long before Nvidia cards were 1.7% woodscrews.

I don't do any programming as I don't enjoy it, things like reddit and stackoverflow or random forums I end up on when looking for ways to script things but nothing regular I watch in regards to languages.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 10, 2022)

grahamperrin said:


> Try Reddit Search.



I can't think of a worse search engine. If one is so desperate that they need to search for something on reddit, instead use Google and do "search term" site:https://reddit.com/


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