The age matters less than the power-dynamics of her being his nanny.

To the “they smell bad” bit, I’ll add two things:

1. I have pictures (maybe I’ll post some, despite the ick factor) where this fox laid down to sleep right next to a pillow it had shit all over. And we’re not talking pebbles, we’re talking the runs and it was a nightmare to clean. It was tempting to burn the thing… I also have to clean massive piles of fox poop off the decking on a regular basis.

2. There is this: Dog poo forms a significant part of foxes’ diet

Of course, one captive-bred will likely be better, but I absolutely agree with you they won’t make great pets.

They are cute, but frankly, that is just about sufficient to let me tolerate them sleeping in the gazebo and thoroughly washing stuff afterward, but not nearly sufficient to make me consider one as a pet.

Frankly, I’ve seen it more often from Emacs users themselves, including while I used it myself for ~20+ years.

My own. My Emacs config grew over years to several thousand lines, and it got to a point where I decided I could write an editor in fewer lines that it took to configure Emacs how I liked it. It’s … not for everyone. I’m happy with it, because it does exactly only the things I want it to, and nothing else, but it does also mean getting used to quirks you can’t be bothered to fix, and not getting to blame someone else when you run into a bug.

That said, writing your own editor is easier than people think, as long as you leverage libraries for whichever things you don’t have a pressing need to customize (e.g. mine is written in Ruby, and I use Rouge for syntax highlighting, and I believe Rouge is more lines of code than the editor itself thanks to all the lexers)

As the old (bad) joke goes: Emacs is a great operating system. Shame it lacks a good editor.

Not trying to convince you - people have different preferences, but Ruby does exactly what you say and nothing else unless you start pulling in gems that do lots of monkey patching or metaprogramming cleverness.

This is one of the reasons I dislike Rails in particular - it twists people’s idea of what clean Ruby can be like and introduces a lot of “magic” conventions that makes the code hard to read for someone who doesn’t know Rails.

A lot of Ruby programmers do overdose on the “clever”, often inspired by Rails. You can do some truly insane things with metaprogramming in Ruby, but a lot of the time the cleverness is unnecessary and a bit of a footgun that people grab too early instead of thinking the problem through and realising there are simpler solutions.

My terminal is written in Ruby, and it uses a font-renderer that’s 100% Ruby ( https://github.com/vidarh/skrift - I didn’t write it from scratch, it’s a port from C ), and it’s definitely possible to get things “fast enough” for a surprising portion of code in Ruby these days, but you may end up writing Ruby code that is “surprising”. For faster Ruby, see e.g. Aaron Patterson’s walkthrough of speeding up a lexer which ends up doing things most Ruby devs would not usually do because at least some of the things he ends up doing goes against the readability (e.g. the TrueType renderer I linked above definitely sacrifices speed and assumes you’ll memoize heavily to maintain readability). For an interpreter, you’re probably right to drop to something lower level.

The most delciously evil part of INTERCAL is “COMEFROM” (though COMEFROM was proposed a number of times as a joke long before INTERCAL)

Ignoring the intentionally esoteric languages, of languages in actual use: J, K. Any descendant of APL, basically, and APL itself, though arguably APL is less obtuse than many of its descendants.

E.g, quicksort in J (EDIT: Note Lemmy seems to still garble it despite the code block; see the Wikipedia page on J for the original and other horrifying examples)

    quicksort=: (($:@(<#[), (=#[), $:@(>#[)) ({~ ?@#)) ^: (1<#)

(No, I can not explain it to you)

My own custom text-editor, because it’s written to fit into my environment exactly how I want it.