jyounker

You're free to do that, but I'm not sure that this is the best thing in the world. Of the people who I know who were in the US military, generally the more highly placed they were, the less faith they had in the command structure.

Yes, you can extend the language with more syntax. This kind of proves my point.

If there weren't deficiencies then you wouldn't need to define more syntax, and so many work-arounds wouldn't have already been created. The deficiencies in SQL are why each big SQL database ends up creating some procedural-SQL language for use in stored procedures and triggers.

CTEs are close to what you outline above, but even then (as far as I know) you can't name that CTE and use it across multiple statements.

The issue with Python and most other non-LISP family programming languages is that they don't allow you to easily treat programs as data. Things that are simple to express with Scheme become complicated exercises when using mot another languages. Instead of focusing on the underlaying concept students end up having to focus on the implementation language's details in a way that they don't with Scheme.

The covid analysis seems like a pretty good example: https://colab.research.google.com/github/EvgSkv/logica/blob/...

A good exercise might be converting it to the corresponding SQL and comparing the two for clarity.

> Basically, SQL syntax makes easy things easy. This gets underestimated a lot, indeed people seem to have contempt for it. I think that's a serious mistake.

The flip side of that is SQL makes hard things nearly impossible.

SQL doesn't have facilities for abstraction, and it doesn't compose, and this has consequences that I deal with daily.

The lack of abstract facilities makes it hard to construct complicated queries, it makes it hard to debug them, and it makes it hard refactor them.

Instead of writing more complicated SQL queries, developers lean on the host languages to coordinate SQL calls, using the host language's abstraction facilities to cover for SQL's inadequacies.

> No weird OOP-style class instantiation for something as simple as just getting the name.

I understand the desire to no waste your time, but I think you're missing the big idea. Those statements define logical relations. There's nothing related to classes or OOP.

Using those building blocks you can do everything that you can with SQL. No need for having clauses. No need for group by clauses. No need for subquery clauses. No need for special join syntax. Just what you see above.

And you can keep going with it. SQL quickly runs into the limitations of the language. Using the syntax above (which is basically Prolog) you can construct arbitrarily large software systems which are still understandable.

If you're really interested in improving as a developer, then I suggest that spend a day or two playing with a logic programming system of some sort. It's a completely different way of thinking about programming, and it will give you mental tools that you will never pick up any other way.

But lesser convenience and with more hassle.

I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I've seen too many software systems that failed in undetectable ways, and the user was disbelieved. The damn thing is fly-by-wire and if the instruments are failing for unknown reasons, then I could easily believe that the controls started glitching too, and that this isn't reflected anywhere.

But it didn't land itself, unlike the cornfield bomber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber

This seems like a stretch. As far as I know, usually DNA evidence in exonerations is more along the lines of, "The DNA is 98% match for a known killer who was arrested for similar crime a few years later."

I'm not really sure what argument you're trying to make here. Plants regularly use toxins to kill off competitors. We even know how at least on of them works now: https://www.mpg.de/9731123/plants-allelochemicals-competitio...

It's worth noting that the worst weeds in this story are all traditional native american crops. We are investing huge amounts of money to kill food.

If they didn't understand the intent, why would they check with a lawyer to see if they could get away with ignoring it?

The statistics back you up. Violent crime in the USA is about what it was in early 70s, far below it's peak in the late 80s/early 90s. [Most of the decline seems to be linked to legalized abortion and elimination of leaded gasoline.]

When you get a scrape and you bleed, thousands of your cells burst forth and die. Each has the same set of information necessary to rebuild an entire person. Have you committed mass murder?

For the most part epigenetic traits seem to be transmitted by DNA too. Rather than being encoded in the pattern of base pairs, the epigenetic changes are made by slightly modifying the structure of individual bases. Think of it as adding tags to instructions.

Which of course actually means nothing. Being against DEI is just a coded way of saying, "we don't want to compete with women and non-white people".

It's not a trick though. It's normal Python code. It's so common that you don't even think about it. It's just how equality comparisons work in the language.

As someone who trained in mathematics, I would 100% say that mathematicians would evaluate it as true. It's not the cleanest way to write it, but intent is clear.

TL;DR; Declares claim that "that feature is only good for specific rare workloads" is odd. Justifies that statement by pointing out that the feature works well of their specific rare workload.

I wrote intentionally bad sorting algorithms for a while. One worked by making a random interchange, and then checking to see if the list was sorted. I refer to this as the minimal maximally stupid sort.

You to be inventive to get a sorting algorithm worse than this, but it's quite fun.

I considered writing a book of them called "101 stupid sorts".

There is an easy solution: Don't require residency for employment. Everyone is entitled to full protections of labor law, document immigrant or not. This eliminates much of the incentive to abuse non-documented labor. Then make it even stronger. If a non-resident employee brings suit against an employer for violating labor laws in a significant way, and they win, then they are entitled to citizenship as repayment for helping to enforce our labor laws.

When they leave their country it's called Brain Drain.

It sounds like you're having a hard time, but I'm not sure you're assessing your situation accurately.

Thirty-five is not when age discrimination kicks in. Age-wise it is the sweet spot. People have had enough time to master their craft, and enough experience to hit the ground running without requiring too much management.

I'd suggest asking people who know you and who have worked with you for their honest assessment of working with you.

It's more like summary of a 30+ year research program with many many many academic papers behind it.

He's a leading theoretician of complex systems, and this is probably intended to wrap up his work before he dies, and to provide guidance for those coming after him.

I went I read the first few paragraphs I thought, "Is someone ripping off Stuart Kaufmann? He was writing about this idea thirty years ago." Then I read the first author: Stuart Kaufmann.

For those of you following along at home, Kaufmann has been developing the ideas here for decades. The paper is less a "here is a new idea" and much more "here is a concise summary of 50 years of work". The words and thoughts seem opaque, but this is case where they actually have concrete and specific meanings. It's worth noting too, that towards the end of the article he outlines experiments that could be used to falsify the theory.

If you want a really hard-core dive into the ideas, then check out his 1993 book, "On The Origins of Order" (ISBN 978-0-19-507951-7).

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...

An expected phase transition in this context is stochastic. The transition to order is expected, and there are bulk properties that are the same on each run, but the exact details differ each time.

I was really turned off by the mention of Kant at first, but reading on it's relevant to the discussion. This is a real scientist applying Kant's idea to real phenomena in a useful way. Please read the paper in detail.

The first author is Stuart Kaufmann: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman

Not a crackpot.

Readers should be aware that The Quillette has been known to produce things which are strictly propaganda, and to take what they write with a significant grain of salt.

An example would be their description of the Cider Riot confrontation in Portland. They presented this event in an apparently impartial way, when in fact it was an organized assault instigated by the right wing agitators, and the Quillette's reporter (Andy Ngo) was part of the assault.