HN Explorer

Tell HN: X is dead. Long live X.

24 points by BigCanOfTuna ↗ HN
Everyone knows that X in these two sentences originally referred to "The King". However, the sentences should be interpreted as "The (old) King is dead. Long live the (new) King."

Substituting (JavaScript|Java|C#|SilverLight|Flash|etc.) for X doesn't really make sense.

15 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 21.2 ms ] thread
jamesrom
I see this all the time. It doesn't make any sense. It's like how people say 'I could care less'.
veyron
in some languages and cultures (especially yiddish), certain expressions are understood to be sarcastic. I think 'I could care less' was originally used in this sarcastic tone (akin to 'Tell me about it' in US circles)
[dead] jordanekay
No, semantically "I could care less" means exactly the same as "I couldn't care less," in the very same way that in French, "Je ne sais pas" means the same as "Je sais pas." Nothing sarcastic about it.
skimbrel
What I believe the GP was getting at is that "I could care less" is a corruption of the original "I couldn't care less", and one that makes next to no sense as an expression of contempt.
jamesrom
The sarcastic interpretation makes even less sense. Is the sarcastic interpretation 'I could care more' or 'I could not care less'? At any rate, it is definitely not interpreted as sarcasm today, nor is it spoken with any kind of inflection to denote sarcasm.

It's just a pointless statement that has been echoed enough times that we've become accustom to the sound it makes, much like a parrot that mimics 'Polly wants a cracker'.

oh_sigh
I could care less about your opinion. I value it very highly.
rudiger
JavaScript (the programming language) is dead. Long live JavaScript (the compilation target)!
ams6110
I thought this was going to be a piece about X the windowing system.
saintfiends
Same here. I thought Mark Shuttleworth decided the switch to Wayland in next release. You can't really predict these days.
veyron
To my knowledge, the original phrase was intended to make the new king throned immediately after the discovery of the death of the previous king. Unfortunately there's no real atomicity in spoken language ...

As far as the idiom is concerned, it makes perfect sense if you think about the second usage as the set of problems for which the language is commonly used to solve. Take for example JavaScript:

Javascript (the original language) is dead. Long live Javascript (the successor language for the problem of client-side scripting).

This would be a great title for an article about a scripting language like coffeescript

BigCanOfTuna
I could see this argument if an article was titled "Client side scripting (JavaScript) is Dead. Long live client side scripting (Ruby)" ...assuming one of the browsers yanked JavaScript in favor of Ruby.
oh_sigh
> Unfortunately there's no real atomicity in spoken language ...

Bullshit.

START TRANSACTION;

KING = null; KING = new KING();

END TRANSACTION;

just say it.

stonemetal
Sure it does. C# 2 comes out X(old King) refers to C# 1 and X(new King) refers to C# 2. It pretty much is true in the case of C# as soon as a new version is released the old version is dead, there is zero talk about the last version with everything either focused on the current release or the next release.
BigCanOfTuna
Very different. There can only be one king.
rudiger
There can only be one latest version, so it's not too different.