You can't really redefine if because everything is a constant, but you can define if in your own context yes.
In Tcl you can redefine "if", or even delete it entirely if you're crazy enough :-)
Readit Newscmacleod4 commented on When if is just a function ryelang.org/blog/posts/if... · Posted by u/soheilpro
cmacleod4 commented on Hacker News – The Good Parts smartmic.bearblog.dev/why... · Posted by u/smartmic
The one thing that really annoys me about HN is that when you return to a discussion that you read the day before, there is no way to easily find the comments which are new since your previous visit. This is basic functionality which Usenet always had (and still does).
cmacleod4 commented on Hacker News – The Good Parts smartmic.bearblog.dev/why... · Posted by u/smartmic
Usenet was great early on, but near the time of its acquisition it was suffering from the same problems we see now on all social media sites: trolls, objectionable content, power-hungry mods, the works.
All these problems are writ much larger now because the net is like a million times as popular as back then. No social media site can survive on free moderators and without membership fees unless the rent gets paid somehow.
I assert HN requires less "rent" from us users than any other equally successful social media site.
What "acquisition"? Nobody owns Usenet, it's a cooperative effort between many different server operators which continues to this day.
The main difference between Delphi/Lazarus and classic VB is that in classic VB you can pause the program and run commands in the paused program - i.e. running it in a "half-alive" state, though it wasn't fully editable as many changes requiring restarting.
On the other hand Delphi/Lazarus has a much more capable language and richer set of components (and in Lazarus' case much better support for automatic layouts), which IMO is better overall.
But yeah, in the 90s Lazarus didn't exist (Delphi did though) - IIRC it was made around 2000 or so but it was really janky for most of the 2000s.
Note that Delphi (and Lazarus) is used for a lot more than LoB apps. It was used a lot by shareware developers for example (and some still use it, e.g. IIRC both Beyond Compare and Total Commander still use Delphi - with Lazarus for crossplatform and/or 64bit builds).
"pause the program and run commands in the paused program" - that's often possible in Tcl too. There are various ways to interact with a running program, query or modify variables, run commands, load updated code, etc.
cmacleod4 commented on I visited the happiest country. I wish I could unlearn its secret slate.com/life/2025/08/tr... · Posted by u/prawn
cmacleod4 commented on Online Safety Act – shutdowns and site blocks blocked.org.uk/osa-blocks... · Posted by u/azalemeth
I hope any websites geoblocking UK ip addresses will leave some message about why they are blocking access, so the user sees it and hates it.
Here's my geoblock message for https://newsgrouper.org -
Blocked due to UK Online Safety Act
You appear to be connecting from an IP address in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately this site is no longer available to UK users. This is due to the requirements of the UK's Online Safety Act, which are not practical for this site to comply with. If you feel this is unjustified, I can only suggest that you write to your Member of Parliament. This site remains in operation for non-UK users, as they are outside the scope of the Act.
For more information see Ofcom's official site, and an unofficial guide.
Other web interfaces to Usenet are available, and may continue to allow UK users, see Wikipedia.
Yeah, but that’s not what I was referring to. I know Usenet is nowadays mainly used for sharing “massive amounts of multimedia content”, but I was referring to the text-based content. Discussions, stories, proposals.
Yes, I have seen all that on Usenet. I am that old.
I’m not being nostalgic here, but when I think of the pre-spam Usenet, it might be what we need again.
Maybe with a more modern UI? Lemmy, maybe? A federated forum system like Reddit, 4chan? Does that exist at all? A web UI which shows threads from all kinds of servers all together in a phpBB-like interface?
Web UIs exist with a variety of interface styles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit... . The now-defunct novaBBS was probably the closest to phpBB in style, but the new go-pugleaf is aiming in a similar direction.
Because it became full of spam, obscene and illegal material.
For all their faults, big tech do mostly moderate their sites to the extent you won't find illegal things there.
There's a lot less spam since Google Groups disconnected last year. Good text-based providers like https://www.eternal-september.org/ also filter out spam and don't carry the binary groups where porn and piracy is found.
My guess is people don’t want to deal with the learning curve. If it’s not a website or an app people can just start using, it ends up being a non-starter these days. The pain of big tech is not bigger than the pain of the learning curve for most people.
Actually there are a few web interfaces to Usenet that make it easy to jump in, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web-based_Usenet#Web-based_sit...
I operate one of these myself at https://newsgrouper.org .
cmacleod4 commented on Ask HN: What toolchains are people using for desktop app development in 2025? · Posted by u/lincoln20xx
I'm retired now so I don't care what the market thinks. For applications I expect to be run locally by myself and/or a few other geeks, I use good old Tcl/Tk. For things where I'm aiming for a wider distribution I use plain html & javascript (no frameworks).