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Using Reddit for Blog Comments

As mentioned in the last post, the enum-labeling problem and solutions raised some questions which would be nice to discuss. I've wanted to add comments to this blog for awhile, but apparently that's a hard problem in 2016 (long story).

I've settled on using Reddit. I created the /r/oilshell subreddit, and plan to submit every post there and link to the comments. Reddit has a good interface for commenting; my only hesitation is that the culture can be unnecessarily hostile.

Daniel Miessler apparently had the same idea, but I don't see an explanation of why his subreddit was quickly abandoned.

So consider this an experiment for now. What I really want to do is turn oil into a hygienic PHP and host a commenting web app with FastCGI, but that's a pipe dream for now.

PHP apparently started out as not a programming language, but as a set of CGI tools following the Unix philosophy. It's a bit like shell and make in being an instance of failure by success, having evolved in a haphazard way. Awk isn't as messy, but that might be because it's not as widely used as shell, make, and PHP.

So I will ask my questions tomorrow, and then return to the work on ASDL.

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