> You can’t say anything of substance in 280 characters

Your preceding comment is 247 characters.

And it would make a poor hn story

If you're using Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/hide-w3schools/

There's a streaming format which is used for this: JSON Lines [1] AKA newline-delimited JSON [2].

[1] http://jsonlines.org/

[2] http://ndjson.org/

Devel::Tokenizer::C generates horrible code, even worse than gperf. Much better is my Perfect::Hash module, this postgresql module or the new perl5 mph script.

Haven't checked re2c but it looks like a naive lexer implementation generating a static DFA bytewise, not optimized for speed nor memory.

Better generators should really operate on the wordlevel or wider (SSE), not bytes. These are ~8x faster, in some case up to 200x. http://blogs.perl.org/users/rurban/2014/08/perfect-hashes-an...

(The Groucho Marx joke isn't sarcasm.)

> They're not stupid and understand very well what the current climate is, but decided to announce this peculiar tool anyway.

It's not new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13713443

Thanks for pointing this out, the timing seemed really strange.

Several more are listed here: https://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-bad...

> My dreams of having the safe navigation operator from Coffeescript (a?.b?.c) must yet remain unfulfilled...

Not for long: https://github.com/babel/babel/pull/5813

You just made my day :)

Neither requires root:

* https://github.com/creationix/nvm

* http://kazhack.org/?post/2014/12/11/npm-install-g-without-su...

* http://kazhack.org/?post/2014/12/12/pip-gem-install-without-...

You can do it without root if you take precautions, but the default is to use root.

Depends on the system. The default on Arch Linux is local gem installs:

    $ cat /etc/gemrc
    # --user-install is used to install to $HOME/.gem/ by default since we want to separate
    #                pacman installed gems and gem installed gems
    gem: --user-install

That's a nice touch and some good work on the part of the package maintainer. Most (Ubuntu, RedHat, etc.) do not, they just expect you to sudo everything.