vorg

> Ant uses advanced machine-learning algorithms and custom programmable chips to crunch huge quantities of user data in a few seconds, to determine whether to grant a customer a loan

Is this legal in the U.S. and E.U.? These AI systems can increase profits by saying who should get loans, but not why they should. If a U.S. business can't give clear criteria on how it decides on whether or not to grant loans, and instead allows an AI to decide based on any possible unknown criteria which could include ethnic profiling, then wouldn't they get sued soon enough?

I didn't get the impression DanAndersen expected them to; he wrote "of course"...

> the reading materials provided of course didn't go into any potential negatives of the Beijing government

> All the examples are Java 9, Scala, Groovy, or Clojure

Some of those languages are more functional than others. I'd put them on a scale from least functional to most like so:

  Java 8 (least functional)
  Apache Groovy
  Java 9
  Scala
  Clojure (most functional)

> Revision history only goes back to 2007

Perhaps a former programmer deleted the revision history when they were about to move into a management role at your organization. I once stumbled upon a manager's name in the history of a 1970's Cobol program which had a goto statement every 5 lines, and it usually took half a day to make a simple change. All of the other similar-looking programs had had their history purged. When I showed the history notation to the manager, the look on his face wasn't nostalgia but fear.

> the biggest contribution both languages have made for the future are their respective runtimes and that they allow new languages to adopt those (Clojure, Scala, Kotlin, F#...)

I'd say that's true of the JVM, where independently developed high-adoption languages Kotlin and Scala have flourished, but not so of the CLR, whose only "new" language of any import is F#, developed by Microsoft themselves and kept in step with C#.

> C++ enterprise code looks mostly C with C++ compiler

This seems to be the dirty little secret of C++ programming. It seems any corporate site that decides to go serious with Object Orientation also decides to do Managed Memory, and switches to Java or C#, and lately maybe even Go.

Which language would I choose if I could only code in one language for the rest of my life? English, of course. I can encode more meaning in English than those examples you gave, and that's my criteria. But I wouldn't blame someone else for choosing C if their criteria was how fast code written in that language could run on a PC, or Lisp if their criteria was building DSL's quickly, or Russian if their criteria was communicating with people living in Novosibirsk.

Laughed when I saw this Apache Groovy code slinking away at the bottom of the article:

> To start using Android KTX in your Android Kotlin projects, add the following to your app module's build.gradle file:

  repositories {
    google()
  }

  dependencies {
    // Android KTX for framework API
    implementation 'androidx.core:core-ktx:0.1'
    ...
  }

If you look at the Fed Rep of Germany, but Austria and Switzerland are also German-speaking nations and should be counted. Austria was part of the Nazi regime, and the Switz did their banking. Austria's been far more hard-right than Germany, and Switzerland far more isolationist, e.g. not joining the EU.

Yes, every nation in the world has a "big shame", but none of them really face it. They might play "good cop, bad cop" by dividing into several "nations", each with a different policy. Remember, "the Germans" comprise many "nations", i.e. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Germany was even 2 nations for half the 20th century, and Switzerland was virtually all German-speaking until 1815. Have the Switz Germans really faced up to financing the Nazis?

Or a nation might face up to a big shame as cover so they can nurture many "little shames", like modern Germany's treatment of its Turk residents.

Apache Groovy brought closures to the JVM in its day, something no other JVM language had at the time, kudos to its creator James Strachan who was dissatisfied with Beanshell. Now that Java 8, Kotlin, Scala, and Clojure also brought closures/lambdas mainstream, I'm not really sure what unique proposition Groovy brings to the JVM any more.

Rather than needing to know the probable weight of 26 sheep and 10 goats is 7700kgs, you need to know by what margin of error it's probably over 5000kg. And you not only need to know the minimum age of 28 yrs, but also the probable age distribution of people with commercial boat licences, in both China and other countries. Along with knowing risk factors such as piracy rates in areas of the world where live sheep and goats are transported, you can combine all this info into a statistical model useful for actuarial purposes. Perhaps the exam question was searching for primary school kids to fast-track for a career in China's growing Insurance industry.

Just a note: The edition of Apache Groovy that's bundled with Jenkins has its collections API crippled, so it provides a less "functional" experience than when Groovy's used for normal scripting. Given that easy access to the map-reduce-filter paradigm is the main reason I'd give up static typing to use Python/Ruby/Groovy, I don't know how you put up with it.

> Yes, the redesign took more than a decade

Quite true! In fact, the redesign took more than a decade and a half (July 2000 to Dec 2015). A record worth breaking!

> can someone point to the analog of this https://docs.perl6.org/language/grammars in Python, Ruby, Groovy etc?

Those language grammars, if they've been properly implemented, could be the Perl 6 killer feature if well promoted. It could even lead to a sudden fall in brogrammers using regexes to parse html.

Looking at the ranking of those languages you mentioned on Tiobe, i.e. Python (4.7%), Ruby (2.4%) and Apache Groovy (0.3%), I guess if Python 3 took the initiative and implemented them, that would work as well.

Whoops, I should've read that phrase "new country" in context.

As for your edit about NZ's economy being mainly "services", if you subtract industries owned/controlled by Australia/US/UK (e.g banks, TV content), re-apportion industries servicing the Ag/Meat/Milk/Wool/Forestry/Fisheries industry as being part of that industry, and do similar for industries servicing "Human Arrivals" (e.g. house construction being part of Immigration/International Ed), then you end up with the two big drivers of New Zealand's economy: Human Arrivals and Primary Production. They don't fit into the official categories in the govt's accounting system, but they're the real engines of NZ's economy. The rest are just hangers-on.

Technically, New Zealand's a "country", but to call it a "new country" is pushing it. It's a cultural appendage to the U.K. and the U.S. West Coast, with a bit of Hong Kong thrown in. It's the unitary state that never joined Australia in 1901, being listed in the Australian Constitution as one of its 7 candidate states. It would have joined the Australian Federation if refrigerated shipping hadn't have been invented a year before, meaning they could ship their meat products to London instead of relying on a guaranteed open market at Sydney. Meat and other primary production is NZ's main industry, what with the banks and most other large corps being owned by their larger Australian counterparts. The only other industry in NZ of note is "Human Arrivals", which not only includes Tourism and International Education but also Immigration (despite being on the country's capital rather than current account). Of course, New Zealanders refer to Australia as "the 52nd state", so calling Australia a "new country" is also pushing it.

I thought in QM you couldn't know both the degree of rotation and the direction of the axis for a particle. If so, I wouldn't call that "well-defined".

There must be something else in the Universe to observe the single proton for it to have rotation, etc, according to quantum physics. Extend this idea to the centrifugal force on the water in the bucket in a Universe with nothing else in it, and the centrifugal force is similarly both there and not there, in a quantum superposition until observed. The value of Planck's constant is thus a function of the large-scale distribution of energy in the Universe, rather than a fixed property of spacetime itself.

Perhaps people using Go, Elixir, Rust, or Kotlin to build something in a startup are expecting to make money selling the skills they gained building it rather than expecting to make money from the software they build.

> but Unicode makes that argument even sillier

Unicode Standard (version 10.0, section 23.1 Control Codes) makes it clear that it "specifies semantics for the use" of only 9 of those ASCII control codes you mentioned, i.e. U+0009 to U+000D (HT, LF, VT, FF, CR) and U+001C to U+001F (RS, GS, RS, US). The rest of the 65 ASCII and Latin-1 control codes, except U+0085 (NEL), "constitute a higher-level protocol that is outside the scope of the Unicode Standard".

Particularly about NUL, it says: "U+0000 null may be used as a Unicode string terminator, as in the C language. Such usage is outside the scope of the Unicode Standard, which does not require any particular formal language representation of a string or any particular usage of null."

So Unicode makes that argument less silly.

> [Kotlin] does not overlay Java like e.g. Groovy does

Apache Groovy 1.x was dynamically typed only, and focused on scripting and glue code for the JVM and syntactic compat with java, so could be said to "overlay Java". Since Groovy 2.0 however, it changed tack with static typing targeted for Android development, not keeping up with syntax changes in Java such as lambdas from Java 8, and tried to compete with Java instead of complementing it. It no longer "overlays Java", and in fact lost out to Kotlin and Scala in its effort to compete with Java. Groovy should have stuck to its knitting instead of changing direction every few years.

> /r/groovy 1.8k users](http://www.reddit.com/r/groovy)

At first sight, not only has Kotlin grown from 1300 to 8000 redditors, but Apache Groovy has also grown from 1400 to 1800. However, whereas Kotlin has averaged over 100 postings a month, Groovy's reddit site has had a mere 20 postings in the past 6 months. Got to look at more than just number of users because some a language backer can easily twit "hey everyone, go join groovy on reddit and get our numbers up".

Also when you want to put package-main files in a library package directory, you need to put

  // +build ignore

near the top of it.

Yes, I agree. I changed my outlook on programming after I spent about 2 years playing with Clojure as a hobby, then 1 year on Haskell.

> the scare quotes around "learn"? I feel that putting the quotes there is rather impolite

When I say I've learned (or learnt) a programming language, I mean more than a 4-hour jump start to basic proficiency level. Perhaps I was letting off some steam over the wild claims many programmers make regarding their PL expertise.

Did you know that Jenkins Pipeline cripples Groovy so all its features aren't available, specifically the Collections-based methods that form the basis of many DSL's?

> Last week I learned Groovy in about 4 hours

How well did you "learn" Apache Groovy? Just enough to change a small Gradle build file?

And did you already know any Java beforehand? If so, then there's a lot less Groovy that needs learning.

Did you write enough Groovy code to stumble across some of its many gotchas, or did you skim some docs and just learn what Groovy should be?

> 2040 is, which is divisible by 7 iff 204 is

I don't follow that one.

To check whether 2747 is divisible by 7, I divide the multiple of 100 (i.e. 2700) by 50 (i.e. 54), add it to the remaining two digits, 47 (i.e. 101), then see if that's divisible by 7.

If "the bigger the interface, the weaker the abstraction", then would that mean the opposite is also true, i.e. the smaller the interface, the greater the abstraction? If so, then interface{} would be the greatest abstraction of all, and pure dynamic typing Python-style throughout the program the best design choice!

> First person to hear a line of 8 nuggets spoken

It's so difficult to stay awake in these meetings that just taking in what you hear is an achievement. I've a theory Bullshit Bingo was actually invented by the managers themselves as a way to keep the attendees awake during such gatherings.