Defletter

It's certainly cleaner, but my immediate thought when reading was "that's a compile error" because it looks like it's declaring a variable with a type mismatch. This is where, in other languages, the "case" keyword (or similar) comes in handy (eg: Dart's if-case syntax[1]), except Rust doesn't have that because of its headlong pursuit of 'conciseness'.

- [1] https://github.com/dart-lang/language/issues/2181

He is conflating progress and business model innovation with profits. That since the US allows its corporations to get repugnantly large and wealthy, enough to rival many developed nations' GDPs, the US necessarily has more progress and business model innovation. It's just American exceptionalism.

Goodness, how specific.

> at the cost of rate of progress and business model innovation

That's a pretty massive claim. Do you have any examples of this?

Congrats? I've personally experienced driver issues on my laptop and desktop, both from the hardware being too new for the kernel (or at least the version being used by that distro), within the past two years. And this is LMDE, not some fringe one-man fork.

I both want and worry about this. I genuinely hope this does not become as effectively mandatory as having a smartphone.

Isn't that just YikYak?

Assuming this works over SSH, then presumably people who are literate with a terminal but prefer GUIs.

Yup, which is why movements like https://conventionofstates.com/ can be quite frightening. As while it may seem reasonable at first glance, you needn't look very hard to find the sinister intent. Surely by now there has to be a name for the concept, similar to Godwin's Law, of right-wing movements bringing up George Soros. In addition, it mentions gay marriage, abortion, and the Affordable Care Act as examples of why a Convention of States is necessary. How lovely =/

> The government at the time lost numerous important cases when trying to implement Brexit.

Yup, in the two cases that come to mind, the Supreme Court kicked the issue back to Parliament: Miller I[1] said that, given the extreme constitutional consequences of no deal, the Government couldn't unilaterally trigger Article 50, such a decision could only come from Parliament. This was more just a procedural issue. An Act[2] was passed a couple months after the judgment, and Article 50 was triggered a couple days later. Whereas, Miller II[3] was about the Government proroguing Parliament in order to silence it. The Supreme Court was having none of that, so it annulled the prorogation. In both cases, the Supreme Court was protecting Parliament.

- [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_Secretary_of_Stat...>

- [2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_(Notification_o...>

- [3] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_The_Prime_Ministe...>

Well, we are unfortunately seeing more of this with the rise of populism. However, I feel as if certain factors come together to provide a pretty effective stop-gap:

1. Members of Parliament (MPs) represent roughly 70k people. And while that's still a significant number, it's small enough for them to know and be known by their constituents. It's more difficult to vote against your constituents when you know them.

2. The House of Lords (HoL) can revise and delay, but not block, which means we are functionally immune from cross-chamber games of chicken that result in US-style government shutdowns, or European-style budget bills as confidence motions. We did come pretty close to this with Brexit in 2019, but this was all within the House of Commons given that the ruling party did not command a majority.

3. Parliamentarians usually respect the inertia of institution. As in, the idea that it's right to continue things as they've always been done, unless there's a compelling reason. It's why we're still a Monarchy, why there's still bishops and hereditaries in the House of Lords, etc. Basically, there's a culture of incrementalism. Because if you don't have the inertia, you appear to lack legitimacy, it's just a gimmick.

4. And on the heels of that, I think Parliamentarians have an occupational understanding of the adage "With great power comes great responsibility."

5. The Civil Service, while ostensibly neutral, tends to resign when asked to do anything believed to be damaging to the country.

All of this put together (and probably more than I haven't thought of) means that MPs understand that they could do great damage, and so they restrain themselves.

Contrast this with other countries with difficult systems where politicians stir up the passions of their constituents by naming their systemic limitations, "I would love to do X, but I can't because Y prevents me." A somewhat related example would be abortion in the US, where after Roe v Wade was decided, many states became soapboxes for anti-abortion rhetoric. It's a safe rhetorical position: you can say what you like and then blame the federal government for not being able to do it. But then Roe v Wade was overturned and many of these politicians and states have changed their tune, because the power is now in their hands, they are now answerable to their constituents on this matter. Not that it matters given how much gerrymandering there is, but still, the effect was noticeable.

Well, the British system is particularly unique because there is no formal Constitution, and thus we have no Judicial Review for Constitutionality. There's a pretty interesting talk about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIlkY90Cck8

There's an interesting talk involving Baroness Hale, who'd later go on to be President of the Supreme Court, where she mentions the Belmarsh case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYR414Q8v6A&t=2605s

Yup. What Parliament giveth, Parliament can taketh away. It is scary to think what Parliament can do with a simple majority.

Sure, but that's because the government acted in ways contrary to what Parliament willed.

Yup, the Courts are ultimately there to fulfil the will of Parliament: if there's a clear power granted by Parliament to do this sort of thing, and there's no compelling objection from other areas of law, then this is more just a delaying tactic.

I grow wearier by the day by the incessant calls to denounce and disown everything that isn't perfect.

As I've said, it's fine for people, projects, and organisations to require and enforce a particular style for their code, to demand consistency for their code. The problem comes when people with inflated egos believe they have the right to dictate how the entire world writes their code. I feel like I need to stress that this is the issue here.

The fact that Dart's formatter FAQ tells developers who are unhappy with the output to change their code to satisfy the formatter (https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/wiki/FAQ#i-dont-like...), rather than allowing developers to tweak the formatter to satisfy their code, is such a huge tell about their mindset. And again, these global styles do not "end the discussion" as people in this thread have asserted. The "tall style" PR (https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/1253) refutes that. And that PR has since devolved into bickering and heated demands since its adoption into SDK 3.7.0, since it transforms people's code in ways they dislike and/or find less readable.

Just let people, projects, and organisations enforce their own styles conventions. It's not hard and it shouldn't be controversial.

Do you have any kind of source for such claims?

Yup, the composition of the Court has changed, thus its stance has changed. But if you choose to defer any and all thought to this Court, who consistently give the government wide latitude to do whatever it wants so long as it invokes the magic words "national security", that's your prerogative. It's a sad way to live though.

Hot take: stop being authoritarian with code styles, perchance? You are not so wise as to determine what is clean code for the entire world, and the ego required to believe that you are is beyond astounding. And we're still having these discussions despite unconfigurably prescriptive formatters. This idea that such formatters end these discussions is just demonstrably false... you are literally taking part in one of these discussions.

You just refuse to accept that entities that you do not like also have Freedom of Speech rights. You continue to believe that Freedom of Speech is a positive right to people, rather than a negative right against the government. You are therefore perfectly fine with preemptively suppressing the speech (and commerce) for over a hundred million American citizens, because you perceive a threat from the FYP algorithm, because you do not value the Freedom of Speech rights of entities you do not like. That is a slippery slope. If you don't want to recognise that either, that's your prerogative.

At this point, why even have a negative-right Freedom of Speech if you're just going to treat it like a positive right anyway? Ridiculous.

You seem oddly enthusiastic about giving your government the right to violate freedom of speech for entities you do not like, thus removing a platform used both as a platform for speech and for commerce, for 150 million Americans. It totally makes sense to violate the First Amendment over unproven and hypothetical fears of FYP algorithm misuse. Enjoy your slippery slope :)

You are misunderstanding the argument: I am not against prescriptive formatters. By all means, enforce a style convention for your project, I have nothing against that, nor do I understand how you interpreted that from my comment. I am against prescriptive formatters that cannot be configured. This creates the absurd situation, as previously described, where one must appeal to 'The Committee' who decides the style convention for the entire world. This should not be necessary. Nor should you have to surround your code with formatter-disabling comments (assuming the language even supports that) to, for example, use the "tall" style, as previously mentioned. Nor should you have to literally fork the language or its tools to disable the formatter.

username checks out

Except that a prescriptive formatter with zero configurability is causing this conversation.

Vehemently disagree. I get that go's conventions line up with your own, but when they don't, it's irritating. For example, Dart is finally coming around on the "tall" style (https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/1253). But why should people be forced to wait for a committee (or some other lofty institution) to change a style convention that then effects everyone using the language? What's the harm in letting people write their code in the "tall" style beforehand? Why must the formatter be so insistent about it?

> but IMO, it will become more popular than Rust

While I wish this were true, I very much doubt it, at least not until Zig has proper interfaces and gives up its weird hangup on anonymous functions. It's also extremely easy to effectively lose access to Zig features without cluttering your code. For example, say you want to use libevent in Zig: your event callbacks must use C calling conventions, meaning you lose access to try and errdefer, which are two of the most defining features of Zig. And while you can remedy this by having the callback invoke a Zig function, doing that just doubles every interaction between your Zig code and libevent, which is already cluttered because of the lack of anonymous functions.

These things aren't as important as compile times, but they are annoyances that will drive a non-zero amount of people away.

The last I heard, Rust had issues with freeing memory when it wouldn't need to, particularly with short-lived processes (like terminal programs) where the the Rust program would be freeing everything while the C version would just exit out and let the operating system do cleanup.

> The idea that a foreign, adversarial government would have a Constitutional right to propagandize our citizenry at-scale is obviously not consistent with the societal good (or the "common defense", for that matter), so is outside of the First Amendment's scope/intent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamont_v._Postmaster_General