46 karma · joined October 5, 2011
This is a semantic shift that leaves me uncomfortable.
to implement a feature that's impossible to do any other way. They have a justification for doing this.
You make a claim that the low-level nature of the calculator programming was an enticement to you. That may be, but I would hestitate to generalize based on your own experiences. I would suspect that the ability to come up with something that actually does something conventionally interesting trumps the benefits of working close to the metal, ESPECIALLY with young, novice programmers. A few hours of hacking in assembler and you may get to hello world, whereas the same amount of effort in javascript might net you the ability to drag and drop objects around a UI. Which is more impressive to a kid?
Usually, there are several millions of single votes working together to make it happen. But it's not like anyone's voting in aggregate.
I'm not convinced that what this world needs is research into keeping sick people alive longer. We have lots of people as it is.