reallydude

> Other species are intelligent, but none of them have our innate ability to communicate using complex language.

That isn't proven. There is plenty of evidence, that "complex" is relative and humans have limited sensory organs, compared to other species. Naturally our vocalizations have had to diversify.

It's important to remember that the vast majority of all interspecies communication is non-vocal (this includes non-written). The ability to write is unique to humans, as far as I know. There are more, but they aren't related to vocalization (or communication at large).

If a condition is already bad, why bother trying to make it better? ie:

> Any claim that Google would have helped China censor Chinese citizens ignores the fact that Chinese search engines are already censored

"...so it isn't helping, it's just business as usual."

The counterpoint is that having choice is helpful, especially when the choices include user segments, even if you don't experience it. Also, participating in oppressive behavior is immoral, regardless of the outcome.

Hard is being used in a "type the keys" sense. It's more complexity to borrow idioms from languages then slightly change the syntax (PHP!), which isn't necessary. Like most languages, choices are made without evidence (but plenty of anecdotes and personal style).

> I think MySQL smells like poor engineering, and PostgreSQL like good engineering

> It’s like Python vs PHP, in some ways.

Not just the ordering of the characterization, which would paint PHP in the positive light you clearly think is undeserving. SMH

> So generally whenever somebody in America mentions treason, they're being hyperbolic or misleading,

Some people simply don't need to understand the distinction between similarly used terms. In the end, prosecutors can file multiple charges but practically pick and choose based on a variety of factors.

Elixir is Ruby like wrapper to a prolog based syntax to do actor based programming. It's more of a mess trying to move Erlang's syntax forward than interesting, but ok.

Ponylang is listed as "--" instead of "concurrency as a primitive type".

I'm not sure I can trust anything on the list, so it doesn't motivate me to investigate further. YMMV

Nicest for Python, I assume.

Many languages have FFI. Lua, PHP, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_function_interface

I don't understand the choice of Python for things like gluing together C programs. Seems like a performant mistake, at the very least.

> I would not include such bad behavior from some bad actors as part of the "human condition"

It is. You take the good with the bad. There's not a lot of evidence this is "bad" within that spectrum. It's very subjective, since I never had to question my ethics when working in advertising. There are things I will do and things I won't, but I don't champion the eradication of those things I won't do.

> A good programmer will write readable code in any language,

That's a fantasy, pure and simple. Taking the statement on its face, let us ignore the undefined boundaries of "good" or "readable" and focus on the practical issue. Have you seen Brainfuck or Whitespace? Many languages are less readable than others, be it incidentally or by design. People are imperfect beings and for whatever "good" means, a "good" or "bad" programmer will write code that is against their assessed skill at times.

> It's never good enough to excuse the behavior.

The behavior of click-bait ads isn't terrible in a way that should cause someone to question their own ethics. You may disagree. So what? You aren't going to fix the human condition by drawing a line in the sand, nor would it be moral to do so. The price of skepticism is uncertainty and the price of certainty is extortion (in terms of clicks and attention).

You have to jump through the link to the original article which then has a link to relevant papers, eg: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6116/178

since it's clearly a fabrication to serve some sort of fear-monger campaign.

Historical average is relevant. I have an 18 year old cat. It's an aberration. We evolved under specific pressures. Only recently, have we removed specific age gates.

> what could be changed in the ecosystem to support this goal?

1. Change the syntax. Elixir wasn't far enough. Not at all and BEAM doesn't need to know, so we have a chicken-egg problem of people entrenched don't want to spend time that will help the language and underlying strategies become more widely adopted. Perhaps this was the production feedback loop you were referencing. We still don't have a good methodology for measuring all sorts of things in software dev. 10 years, 20 years, the language may just never do more than incremental changes (like elixir).

2. Handling text is still awful in these languages.

I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean, but I assume it has something to do with arguing about choosing the alternate source of fact on top of the discussion about criticism of wikipedia, which is used as a source of fact.

This is not a winnable debate, but differing views exist.

This is an incomplete list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-of-interest_editing_o...

https://www.quora.com/Am-I-the-only-frustrated-former-Wikipe...

etc.

The dubious nature of wikipedia's editing is recorded within books and articles from over the last decade that are casually discoverable from google. AFAIK, anyone who implies they aren't aware of the biases of editors, are either willfully ignorant (since this is covered under multiple topics within wikipedia itself) or trolling.

> n what way could Britannica possibly be better than Wikipedia.

> Mind giving some examples?

Google can help you with these questions, to your own satisfaction.

My friend, Tiana Baldwin, focused on the statistical correlation between Nursing Home costs and survival metrics. She got an award for her master thesis (and graduated), before becoming the city planner for Anaheim, CA. I would have thought it would be easy to look up. Now she works at Cal State University Fullerton as a Professor under her married name. I'm sure she can point you to the specific study. Sadly, I cannot find it casually.

> getting rid of racism and gender inequality

You can't get rid of racial and gender inequality, because we're inherently inequal to each other AND between the genders. It's in our DNA for the foreseeable future. We can diminish and mute it, at best. Diminishing returns has set in, while we ignore the more impactful issues.

As is the Himalayan Blackberry - https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/weeds/himalayan-blackberry

The himalayan environment spawned some very pernicious and hardy species!

> What we (programmers) normally mean by working we mean "It fulfills the requirement that it was developed against". > Things like code quality, maintainability etc. are separate issues.

That's your characterization and not all how development works in practice. The vast majority of software barely has anything like versioning and a scant few have maintenance/support windows. That's a fact by volume.

Defining the term "Legacy" to mean something specific as a subjective point of reference (since there is no formal definition), eg

> Legacy until relatively recently meant "Not supported" i.e. Windows XP is "Legacy" whereas Windows 7 is not

is helpful, because it lets me understand what you are thinking, clearly. This does not change my position, as my experience is that working code is still called legacy internally, all the time. The historic resource problems with things like broken dependency chains (you can't even build it anymore), or availability of platforms to test on, is common.

> It's not just ineffective, it's dishonest.

People don't understand, so they ask for more information. That's about as honest as it gets.

> tax incentives are the way the government pays people and companies to change their behavior.

Which has nothing to do with motivation. That's a large part of the ask.

There are special gloves, that I have, which allow for gestures on my phone. It uses some sort of special mesh on the outside.

> including tech debt

Tech Debt is not little, or we wouldn't carry it around, rather than devote time (and risk of revealing new unknowns) to fixing it. My agile experience has always favored conquering little stuff first, since ppl recognize stories more than points (which vary in value, over time). This, unfortunately, sometimes leads to the hilariously subversive act of splitting a story up into as many tiny pieces as possible so that some people may inflate that "What have you done for me lately" list while more tangible coding is done by others.

> If the requirements change then the code should change.

That's the nature of the term "Legacy", that you are using. It met requirements that are not the same today (sometimes it's just standards of coding). It didn't change, hence it's legacy code.

> Legacy means it worked.

No and shame on you for pushing this idea, is my first reaction. "worked" doesn't mean anything.

Positing this redefinition of Legacy (and implying what "worked" means) rubs me the wrong way, especially when tying it to the idea of code ownership. Maybe I just have a warped perspective, except that I've run into these scenarios.

"worked" might mean "it was easy to fix and it broke a lot", "it calculated the numbers correctly but nobody knows how to change it without it breaking", or "it costs $5k a run but it gives us the right count of a database column". Legacy means it might be working, depending on your CURRENT needs. Your current needs change, even when the code does not.

Code ownership isn't at a single level, which makes some of this analysis seem idealistic.

> US had no problem when they supported Sadam attacking Iran with poisonous gases

And that was in the past? The US had no problem segregating schools at one point. It's not compelling to bringing up an ancient relationship, where not a single person involved in the whataboutism, is still in power.

We have the internet and extremely timely war coverage now. That no longer flies.

Australia is not a national security concern. This is political wargaming.

> As others have pointed out, that's hardly a contrary opinion.

Opinions are almost universally contrary, despite the knowledge that the URL can be a tool. How often is it put forth that the URL is meant to be indempotent or the URL is supposed to be mapped to another routing system etc. The number of commercial sites where the URL is a field you are meant to manipulate (other than say search engines and even they don't point it out for you) is so small as to be significant.

Yet people did this all the time (2advanced, HomestarRunner, etc) because the web as an application (a product) was served particularly well by an application platform.

There are no consequences. You don't need additional oversight. This is not semantics, at the core of the issue.

The idea that oversight (ie another layer of bureaucracy) is a solution to a problem is what the US legal system has to avoid, to stay effective.