ActiveState going the wrong way

[Andrew Kuchling]

"Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes:
> Don't worry, the "we should eschew this helpful technology because
> our minds would atrophize" brigade won't be deflected by any such
> trifles as common sense, science, or realizing they're spewing BS.

These days I'm going over the Sherlock Holmes stories 
for quotations, and there's an appropriate one:

        "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain
        originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock
        it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the
        lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the
        knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at
        best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a
        difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful
        workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his
        brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help
        him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment,
        and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think
        that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any
        extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every
        addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew
        before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to
        have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."
            -- Sherlock Holmes, in "A Study in Scarlet"

I agree with this, and don't like to clutter up my memory with useless
fiddly details.  This explains why I never remember the switches for
Unix commands like 'ps' and 'ls', why I gave up reading _Programming
Perl_ 3 chapters in, and why I don't know C++.

--amk