RichardFord

I always enjoy seeing small scandanavian tactics (Norway, Sweden, Finland) tactics against German, Russian juggernauts.

I'm guessing in about 20 years you'll start seeing propaganda to force it.

But that's just the beginning. After that you'll start seeing some kind of kill switch being mandatory. Then you'll start seeing more regulations to dissuade people from even owning cars, autonomous or not. And then of course the final step is to impose "sign ups" for when you want to use some government vehicle (all in the name of global warming, or whatever name they'll switch to by then).

Python and Ruby aren't dominant against C#, Java, and C++. JavaScript is in its own category since you kind of have to use it.

Unlike in the United States, where freedom of expression is a fundamental right that supersedes other interests, Europe views an individual’s privacy and freedom of expression as almost equal rights.

Except everybody knows that the right privacy is not the reason. EUrocrats needed to use subterfuge as an opening salvo for the beginnings of censorship, so this is what they came up with.

But there's no surprise that NYT would give the EU the benefit of the doubt, since they tend to fawn all over whatever wacky EU policies are implemented anyway.

Sadly? If COBOL was the lingua franca of the web would it be sadly?

This is a step in the right direction. I'm always looking for new tools that help in understanding code bases and streamline workflows.

The inline table is cool. I like the idea of embedded documentation like that, as long as its structured in a way that can be turned on-off.

The Scala plugins for Intellij and Eclipse both have worksheets, which I think as of REPLs on steroids.

The one thing I'm still missing from most mainstream development environments though is interaction of live, running programs - the kind seen in Common Lisp and Smalltalk.

Java has it kindof, then enhanced more with JavaRebel (a commercial tool). .NET edit-n-continue is still frustratingly crippled in many ways.

I still feel like I'm programming in a batch environment instead of "molding" my code though.

Yeah, she was way too gung-ho about potentially forcing this stuff on people via the water supply. But I'm not surprised that an academic would want to social-engineer this way.

So essentially you agree that at least a quasi-totalitarian world will be needed in order to "protect" the environment.

Of course, your premise is that people will just roll over and take it. A more likely scenario is a world war that would make WW II look like 3rd graders throwing sticks at each other.

Predictable? There's autocratic regimes out there where life is much more predictable. We probably more laws to keep government and other autocratic shitbags in check.

Yeah, it's always the other guy that needs strict parenting from the government right?

There is no "our goal as society". But the vast majority of people that care about running Matlab, Octave don't share your goal.

Yep, the socialist/statist European downvoting mafia is on the march on this story as usual

Except we all know it's not about safety.

Emacs is my preferred text editor. I don’t use old-fashioned text editors as much as I used to, because I often need more specialized tools. I use IDEs for various programming languages and other things when producing high quality documents. And yet, I often wish I could subsume these with a tool that had the basic goodness of emacs.

I love the ease of customization of Emacs and other text editors, but they're just plain dumb when it comes to knowing programming languages.

My comment about Android was all about market share and nothing about the quality.

The author (and others who use desktop Linux) can't be happy with his personal choice of desktop. Instead he's bitter and angry that others don't make the same choice that he does. That's way too common in many facets of life these days.

There are many factors why desktop Linux didn't take off. One is the whole Gnome/GTK+/KDE/Qt debacle. Many know the details, but with limited resources and not being radical enough in your designs, then there had to be more collaboration and not division (Gnome vs KDE).

Distros were similar enough to not be very differential, but incompatible enough to make support a nightmare for ISVs.

The other direction that could have been taken is a whole lot more experimentation with radical designs. Trying to be better than Windows was always going to be a losing strategy. Just don't be Windows.

I guess there is some redemption in Android, but I think the diehards will never accept Android as a real desktop Linux.

I really like Dylan, but it has a huge problem that never gets discussed - verbosity. The syntax is entirely too verbose for a modern language. My suggestion would be to first complete the Intellij plugin and then actually change the syntax so it can compete with the scripting languages.

I pay about $75 for 2 gigabytes from Verizon, so I don't know where these numbers are coming from.

I'm loving the .NET framework as a career. When it comes down to it we have 2 major choices to choose from - Java and .NET framework, with a smattering of Python around.

Given those two choices I'll take C# any day over Java. Where Java has it right is in the ecosystem. It's more mature for obvious reasons and has great alternative language communities - Clojure and Scala. We have F#, which is great.

But for day to programming, I don't think Java and Intellij beats Visual Studio and Resharper. You can become very productive with VS/ReSharper and C#.

It's going in the wrong direction. Instead of empowering people to make good decisions, you're advocating putting a government gun to the heads of people to make them make healthy choices.

So are you going to throw more people in prison for the illegal sugar trade?

It never ceases amaze me how many people on HN actually advocate these draconian, statist policies. Stop hating on your fellow man.

I have a feeling the only thing that will stop the obesity epidemic is heavy food regulation which people will fight tooth and nail against

People rightfully should fight against that heavy regulation. You don't want to go down that road. Whatever unhealthy dietary choices that people are making is a much better alternative to government regulating people's diet. Think about it for a while.

Blah..blah..blah, "the rich are psychopaths"...blah, blah.

This is just more classwarfare, neo-marxist drivel from a predictable rag like the guardian

According to Banga, in addition to being bad for MasterCard, cash is bad for countries and governments.

Yeah, if you're of the mindset that everything that anybody purchases should be tracked and scrutinized.

What's interesting and disturbing about your comment is that you barely touch on what is supposed to be the whole purpose of the law - privacy. I think you understand that this is all about censorship, but still support it.

They had come up with an excuse to use as an opening salvo for censorship, so they came up with "right to be forgotten".

Dylan was a victim of bad timing if anything. Apple was in the middle of its worst period when they shelved it. And then Java came along and the third parties that were working on independent implementations got steamrolled by that. It's a shame, because despite its verbosity, Dylan is a powerful language and still one of my favorites.

Natalie Portman and hot grits in your pants.

I can't stop using vi key bindings, whether that's Evil for Emacs, VsVim for Visual Studio, the Intellij one, Sublime, etc..

But my days of using straight Vim are over. For a straight text editor, I finally got over the hump with Emacs recently, and I'm not going back.

All I can off is anecdotal information from talking to Americans when I'm down there, and the middle class don't understand how poor they are in America compared to their wealthy. They seem to feel that they're almost wealthy, but what they don't realize is that the difference between the middle and lower classes is a rounding error compared to the wealth of the upper class.

That's not anecdotal. You're playing mind reader to fit your own political agenda. That's pretty rude to your friends....if even that's true.

They also don't realize that a middle class Canadian has more disposable income than their southern equivalent, and yet Americans receives almost none of the free health care or other social safety nets

And once again, a Canadian doesn't understand that health care isn't free no matter how many times they say it.

No, why should it? Just because we've learnt neoliberalism is flawed doesn't mean we should unlearn that statism was also disastrous (in different ways).

Thanks for keeping on making my point :) There is no "we". There is you and some people that are in ideological agreement with you, but there is no we. Why do you have such a hard time understanding this?