RichardFord

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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#.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?