LeonidasXIV

Most of the issues go away if you use Async and Core (or Base these days) since it is a very good and rather complete standard library and a thoughful Async implementation.

The issue with the web framework still stands. Not many people do web development in OCaml so the support is rather sparse.

Maybe it also depends on the stationery and mobile access you have. In Germany streaming music wasn't feasible a decade ago since you had pretty limited data plans and arguably it still isn't really all that feasible on mobile internet still unless you download for offline on WiFi.

Meanwhile in Denmark or Poland there is very little in terms of data limits.

> And if you do have more platforms, why not just check in one node_modules-directory for each?

Now you have to sync it or risk running into unreproducible build failures. Also, if you update the binary dependencies on say, macOS, then you still need some x86-64 Linux to build the dependency.

Not saying it is not possible but without a proper process (e.g. a build server being the only place that updates dependencies) this is going to be painful.

Same in Denmark. If you don't support contactless payments that basically means you're not in business.

That said, people mostly use cards; potentially because the bank apps that existed before were just really awful and didn't work the majority of the time. But Google Pay and Fitbit Pay work great.

Similarly, another nordic capital, Helsinki (pop. 631.000):

https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/1...

Or OCaml with js_of_ocaml.

Which is rather not where the world has been going towards in the last decade or so.

That said, northern EU is the place where people don't remember exactly how cash looks like since everything is paid either with card or using an app. But northern EU is population-wise a rather small market.

Would you consider the recent Joker movie to be a superhero movie? I do absolutely consider it cinema.

If we define cinema to exclude boring and predictable, then a lot of US cinema stops being so, super hero movie or not. The same goes for most Hollywood comedies and tons and tons of love stories. Guess it is time to switch to French arthouse.

Guess my point is, whether a movie is considered cinema or not has little to do with whether it is a super hero movie.

The way I used to learn a lot of words in many languages (mostly English) is to figure out what they mean in context and only if I really can't figure it out (because they are very broad or very specific) look it up and maybe try to remember the next time I encounter them.

That also has the advantage that you'll understand the common words first instead of what someone considered to be a sensible order (one of the first words I learned in French was the French word for parrot, which I have used exactly never since except for joking around with people who learned from the same textbook).

I strongly contest that, I have found many Dutch people to be impeccable to the point of being preferable to native dialects like what people e.g. in Manchester speak. Similar goes for many people from Denmark and Southern Sweden.

That said, Germans often speak English like it was German indeed.

> I feel that German newspapers use quite complicated language.

That might be the case, but in a way it is a topic of pride in Germany to use complicated words since that means you're educated. Bonus points if you use a word with latin roots. I like to use this fact when writing documents to companies, if your writing sounds like a lawyer, they are more likely to comply to your demands.

Official writing and street-usage is very different though, of course and the same is true for English as well.

> I find this surprisingly specific. A help book on the source language specific to the target language... What part of English grammar is only important to students of German but not students of Dutch or Polish?

Quite a lot, since even though English is a very strange Germanic language it is at its core in many ways still Germanic, so it has a large overlap with German that it does not at all share with Slavic languages like Polish. It also shares a lot with Danish (which I find to often sit somewhere in the middle between English and German) and I presume Dutch as well. So yes, that book might very well be helpful in learning Dutch too, it is just a way smaller niche.

Source: I could be considered a native speaker of both German and Polish.

> What makes you say that Europe has a better food quality?

More space to grow food and a large open market between EU countries, whereas Japan grows a lot of rice on the very limited space they have and is very restrictive wrt. importing foods from abroad. Which is why you can good food in Japan but sometimes fruits are ridiculously expensive. Also, bread in Japan is terrible (but then again, good Japanese food in Europe is tricky too).

> Generally, I feel like all these complaints need to be measured against what the alternative is. Which cities have a busy subway system where commuters aren't complaining?

Literally any city in Asia (or at least Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, whose subway company has now branched out to run subways in many parts of the world like Stockholm). In one year of living in Nagoya the subway was late once.

That said it has a way more sensible layout than Munich where one failure in a central point does not cascade to paralyze the entire rest of the network. It is not the worst of course, since it is pretty extensive, but routing nearly every single line through Hbf or Sendlinger Tor couldn't ever have been a good idea.

Except that that hyphen does not make much sense here, if you wanted to write it you'd pick Standardisierungsorganisation instead which gives you a very long word and matching that to ISO is just odd.

In official government speech words don't tend to get that long, instead they get split into multiple ("Bundesministerium der Finanzen" instead of "Bundesfinanzministerium").

Not really, the initialization of the JVM is fast(er), but initializing the Clojure runtime took a lot of time. At least in 1.7, not sure if it got better in the meantime.

I could start and run Java programs way faster than just starting the Clojure REPL.

Wouldn't that completely break all IMEs? I doubt people in Japan, Korea or Taiwan would enjoy not being able to write their language for potentially a very long time.

> There were plenty of them driving, slowly, and loudly beeping. Enough so it was simply impossible to walk without constantly having to move over for them.

Where in Denmark was that? I don't see any loudly beeping delivery cars in Copenhagen.

> People in parks after dark

Truly land of the free.

Behdad Esfahbod lives in Canada though, also most of his FOSS contribution (pango, fontconfig etc) are on the freedesktop.org and GNOME git repo servers, not GitHub.

Unlike the condition system algebraic effects are typed so you can reason about them at compilation time and ensure all of them are at least used somewhat correctly.

It makes quite a bit of difference when I compare e.g. async programming in OCaml with Lwt/Async where I know I've at least hooked up the promises somewhat correctly with e.g. Python or JS where I will notice that it is wrong when the code is executed.

> There isn't much you can do other than spend tens of billions building a bridge or tunnel. Cars often get the ferry to make that journey.

There is a precedent for taking a train on the ferry [0]. Sure, a tunnel is preferable and it would've been constructed but the German authorities were dragging their feet for years[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelfluglinie

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Belt_Fixed_Link

And you can check in and out in exactly one machine in one station, Malmö C. But not at any of the other stations that might be convenient like Hyllie or especially Trianglen.

There were also articles warning that the IC4 debacle (it has a massive page in the Danish wikipedia, the "IC4 saga") could lead to the bancrupcy of the Danish State Railways, DSB. So yeah, it has been an astounding failure.

This is because (at least in many shops in the EU) ordering does imply a sale, no contract has been made, it is only a notion of intent (which if you read the T&C in the order confirmation you'll find pretty often). The contract is only made when the company ships it, thus agreeing to the sale.

As a resident of Copenhagen this was not really my impression. Yes, Palo Alto is cycleable, kinda in the same way any small town in the world is cycleable - low amount of traffic and comparatively wide streets. San Francisco is cycleable because it is 7x7 miles large so not that much space to sprawl but cycling infrastructure is basically completely absent.

What surprised me though is how overall passable public transport in San Francisco was. MUNI and BART are pretty okay for getting around even if locals don't believe so. Unsurprisingly whenever I was in trams, they were full of other European tourists.

> Did you watch re-runs of Top Gear on Dave too?

Nah, I haven't watched any Top Gear. But the seat was just always so comfy in a way none of the seats in the never cars I've been in was. I think it is due to how the seat envelopes you, in a way reminiscent of race cars (which the Astra was not, by any stretch of imagination).

I think heated seats could be possible as well, I assume the required electronics and the protocols they speak for regulation should be rather simple. But given the seat is at home there is not that much need to heat it up :)

While I see your point but as a person living in Denmark I can't help but consider the

> national cohesion

to Greenland and Faroe Islands for that matter to be minimal. It doesn't feel like "proper" Denmark with shipping more expensive, not being part of EU/Schengen, their own respective Kroner-like currencies. I know some Faroese coming to Denmark to study but that's about it. It is not comparable to the rust belt which is more comparable to eastern Germany, more to the Dutch Carribbean which similarly has probably minimal national cohesion with the Netherlands.

In a way it is like with Iceland. That ship has sailed and over time both Faroe Islands and Greenland will break away too, to hardly any change for people living in Denmark. I think Denmark will wish them well for their future endeavors and that chapter of colonialism will finally be closed.

When we scrapped our old '90ies Opel Astra we kept the passengers seat and made it into a funky-looking but insanely comfy regular chair at home by attaching it with some screws to a simple base made of wood, so it is high enough to sit it.

At some point my dad said he's sad we didn't keep the drivers seat as well.