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The Mathematica programming language has many unusual characteristics, two of which are: Everything is an expression. Pattern-based rewrite rules are obscenely powerful. These kinds of characteristics are the foundation of what makes Mathematica a powerful programming language. For example, the bubble sort algorithm can be implemented in a single line without a loop in Mathematica using a single conditional rewrite rule that exchanges adjacent elements when they are out of order: bubble[xs___, x_, y_, ys___] := bubble[xs, y, x, ys] /; x > y This definition causes a new rewrite rule to be injected into Mathematica's global table of rewrite rules. Mathematica then applies this rule to any subexpression it sees that has the form bubble[..] . The pattern on the left side of the rule searches for a pair of adjacent arguments ( x and y ) to bubble where x>y . If the pattern matches then the expression is rewritten such that x and y are exchanged. This example not only demonstra...

We just finished a week of hell after trying and failing to upgrade from Debian Lenny to Debian Squeeze. None of the Debian Linux kernels working correctly on our stock Dell PowerEdge T605 hardware was the first major headache and KDE 4 was the second. In our 10 years of using Linux its user unfriendliness seems to be as poor as ever. With the latest KDE 4, it seems that KDE itself has also gone from bad to worse. We migrated from Gnome to KDE many years ago because we found Gnome to be buggy and user unfriendly only to discover that KDE was only superficially stable. KDE 4 takes this to a new level and our log files are filled with records of segfaults. KMail was once riddled with serious bugs but these were ironed out in KDE 3 and it became a usably-stable e-mail client a few years ago and served us well. Not so with KMail from KDE 4, which regularly segfaults, losing and/or corrupting data and has consistently failed even to move significant numbers of e-mails around within its own ...

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