If you’re rigging an election, it can be better politically to give yourself 65% of the vote than 97% of the vote.

97% is obviously fake. 65% is easier to make people beleive in.

There’s a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:

There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.

I mean, it’s kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.

Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn’t mean that Americans in general are awful people.

According to the UN

In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and others of 7 October, the UN mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape in at least three locations in southern Israel.

The team also found a pattern of victims - mostly women - found fully or partially naked, bound and shot across multiple locations which “may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence”.

In some locations the mission said it could not verify reported incidents of rape.

Or is the UN an Israeli propaganda machine, now?

And memory bugs are only a subset of bugs that can be exploited in a program. Pretending Rust means no more exploitation is stupid.

This is facile.

According to Microsoft, about 70% of security bugs they see are memory safety issues.

Yes: if you introduce memory safety, there’s still those 30% of security bugs left. But, well, I’d rather worry about 30% of issues than 100%…

Similarly, I use libraries that eliminate SQL injections unless you really go out of your way.

Emacs is a bunch older than common lisp.

One of its more idiosyncratic design decisions was using dynamic scope, rather than lexical scope. They did add in per-file lexical scope, though.

It also just doesn’t implement a lot of common lisp’s standard library.

Emacs unfortunately uses Emacs lisp, not common lisp or scheme.

Crosswords have clues going across and down.

The words just use common letters so they’re things puzzle creators wish were real words. They’re not currently words.

The beginning of the ‘Final Solution’ was in June of 1941, and began with the death squads of the Einsatzgruppen murduring Jews as part of Operation Barbarossa.

The commander of Einsatzkommando 3 submitted a fairly detailed report of his squad’s daily murder count by location. Through November 25th of that year, his squad alone murdered 57,338 Jewish men, 48,592 Jewish women, and 29,461 Jewish children.

Babi Yar happened on September 29th and 30th, 1941 - only about 4 months into the Final Solution. Germans put posters up in Kyiv, saying that any Jews who didn’t show up to be relocated would be shot. They took the crowd of 33k people to a ravine, herded them forwards and machine gunned them all down.

Is the Holocaust really the most apt historical comparison? Yes, the Holocaust is in the past, while this is ongoing. But the early days of the Holocaust were incredibly bloody; the massacres didn’t ramp up slowly once the killings commenced.

Two things can both be bad without being equally bad.

The war has been terrible. But do you really think it’s been as bad as Treblinka or Babi Yar?

Symbols display with friendly string-y names in a number of languages. Clojure, for example, has a symbol type.

And a number of languages display friendly strings for enumy things - Scala, Haskell, and Rust spring to mind.

The problem with strings over enums with a nice debugging display is that the string type is too wide. Strings don’t tell you what values are valid, strings don’t catch typos at compile time, and they’re murder when refactoring.

Clojure symbols are good at differentiation between symbolly things and strings, though they don’t catch typos.

The other problem the article mentions is strings over a proper struct/adt/class hierarchy is that strings don’t really have any structure to them. Concatenating strings is brittle compared to building up an AST then rendering it at the end.

Edit: autocorrect messed a few things up I didn’t catch.

Javascript is generally considered OOP, but classes weren’t widely available till 2017.

Inheritance isn’t fundamental to OOP, and neither are interfaces. You can have a duck- typed OOP language without inheritance, although I don’t know of any off the top of my head.

Honestly, the more fundamental thing about OOP is that it’s a programming style built around objects. Sometimes OO languages are class based, or duck typing based, etc. But you’ll always have your data carrying around it’s behavior at runtime.

keeping state (data) and behavior (functions) that operate on that state, together

Importantly, that’s “together at runtime”, not in terms of code organization. One of the important things about an object is that it has dynamic dispatch. Your object is a pointer both to the data itself and to the implementation that works on that data.

There’s a similar idea that’s a bit different that you see in Haskell, Scala, and Rust - what Haskell calls type classes. Rust gives it a veneer of OO syntax, but the semantics themselves are interestingly different.

In particular, the key of type classes is keeping data and behavior separate. The language itself is responsible for automagically passing in the behavior.

So in Scala, you could do something like

def sum[A](values: List[A])(implicit numDict: Num[A]) = values.fold(numDict.+)(numDict.zero)

Or

def sum[A: Num](values: List[A]) = values.fold(_ + _)(zero)

Given a Num typeclass that encapsulates numeric operations. There’s a few important differences:

1. All of the items of that list have to be the same type of number - they’re all Ints or all Doubles or something

2. It’s a list of primitive numbers and the implementation is kept separate - no need for boxing and unboxing.

3. Even if that list is empty, you still have access to the implementation, so you can return a type-appropriate zero value

4. Generic types can conditionally implement a typeclass. For example, you can make an Eq instance for List[A] if A has an Eq instance. So you can compare List[Int] for equality, but not List[Int => Int].

The US and Jordan have been allies for decades, and the US has military bases in allies around the world.

This particular base is located near Syria, so it might be because of the Syrian civil war.

Also, fun fact - the king of Jordan appeared as an extra on American TV. Specifically, on Star Trek Voyager.

The idea of a Pokémon clone isn’t protectable, but existing Pokémon are.

You can make a Pokémon clone with entirely novel monsters, but if a judge thinks they look too much like an existing Pokémon they’re gonna have a problem.

Apparently my brain silently inserted “ing with” into the middle of “program functions” a half dozen times without me noticing.

‘Worse is better’ came from a Common Lisp guy from MIT back in 1991, describing the success of C and UNIX.

It’s really not just that Rust is new and C is old. Compare Rust with Go, for example. Go is a fairly modern example of a ‘worse is better’ language.

Back in 1970s when C was invented, Lisp had been around for over a decade. C came out the same year as smalltalk, a year before ML, and 3 years before Scheme.

Rust is a very modern language, yes. There’s no way we could have had it in the 70s; many of its language features hadn’t been invented yet. But it very much depends on MIT style research languages for its basis.

I agree with you that if you use functions it’s functional.

But many people don’t really realize how that contrasts with procedures and procedural code.

Functions, here, being the key word.

Functions are pure mappings from input to output.

C is many things, but elegant really isn’t one of them.

C has always been part of the “worse is better”/New Jersey school of thinking. The ultimate goal is simplicity. Particularly simplicity of language implementation, even if that makes programs written in that language more complex or error prone. It’s historically been a very successful approach.

Rust, on the other hand, is part of “The Right Thing”/MIT approach. Simplicity is good, but it’s more important to be correct and complete even if it complicates things a bit.

I don’t really think of void* and ubiquitous nulls, for example, as the hallmark of elegance, but as pretty simple, kludgey solutions.

Rust, on the other hand, brings a lot of really elegant solutions from ML- family languages to a systems language. So you get algebraic data types, pattern matching, non-nullable references by default, closures, typeclasses, expression-oriented syntax, etc.