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Read the comment again ... slowly -- mod has a dense writing style that may be difficult to comprehend on first reading. People can actually live "close to the land" all over the world. Farmers, for example. I think a few may even be found in Georgia.

I haven't looked at this in years, but IIRC Knuth's program could be built and run on almost any OS that had a Pascal (?) compiler, whereas McIlroy's solution obviously required a Unix-like shell, piping, and the necessary commands/tools.

A little late to the discussion! The John Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (JHU/APL) uses or used to use FORTH for non-critical satellite flight software (and Ada for mission-critical software). Back in 2009, I came across this 2006 JHU/APL paper about compiling a subset of Haskell down to FORTH for execution on a special-purpose processor: Andrew J. Harris and John R. Hayes, "Functional Programming on a Stack-Based Embedded Processor". ( http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/Forth_functional.pdf )

I don't know if they pursued the use of Haskell any further or even if they still use FORTH. In 2009, when I read this paper and others from them, I discovered that the Lab had hosted a by-then-defunct FORTH Users Group, not exactly an auspicious sign.

Ringo?

What does this mean? C defines the mechanism(s) for passing arguments to a function? That's news to me. The parent's point was that the binary mechanisms are OS- and architecture-dependent. (And compiler-/build-dependent too; e.g., when compilers are designed to pass arguments via registers rather than on a stack.) As other commenters have tried to point out, the diversity of target platforms precludes a single, one-size-fits-all ABI -- for C or for any other language.

How does a language "try to be a good ABI"? An example of such a language would help.

In 9th grade c. 1970, I was in a special studies class where, one quarter, we had to write a paper on any subject. My father, an economist, suggested I write about "Oil Import Control" (not a topic to excite a 9th grader, but very interesting when I got to be an adult). He got copies from the GPO of contemporary Senate hearings studying the subject of limiting oil exports for security reasons. (Not exciting reading for a 9th grader!)

So, the federal government was actively looking into our foreign dependence on oil back c. 1970 (and no doubt at times in prior decades). 50 years later and all we've got are "Drill, baby, drill!" slogans and slow movement to renewables.

I assume you're talking about the Keystone XL pipeline. The biggest problem is that it has to be built before it can be closed and then opened again.

Who, except for people too young to know better, saw value in C but not in Algol? The Bell Labs folks obviously thought enough of Algol such that C is a descendant in the family of Algol-like languages. Algol was widely used in Europe whereas in the U.S. we made do with Fortran, Cobol, and, I think to a lesser extent, PL/I, although the latter had many Algol-like features at the time. (And Fortran evolved to have many of those features; I suppose Cobol also, but I'm not familiar with its post-1981 history.)

Taking a contrarian view to everyone else in this thread, I don't think Unix rocketed C to stardom - Turbo C did. Turbo Pascal was very very popular for PC programming and was eventually supplanted by Turbo C and Turbo C++. Without Turbo C, I think C would have probably become just another niche language used on a niche OS, Unix.

And in line with what you say in another comment, commercial OSes -- including VMS -- were very powerful and much more popular than Unix. In 1982, a single VAX 11/780 running VMS with 4 and 8 MB of RAM could support 10s of programmers editing, compiling, debugging, and testing code. VMS was also a real-time operating system that we used in production to control/monitor/perform-I/O hardware devices handling LANDSAT image data. And Unix is still trying to figure out async I/O ... (Most of my career has been spent on Unix, but I appreciate other operating systems I've worked on as well.)

Yes, Sowell has that effect on people. Once you get your mind back together, I recommend that you (and anyone) read Zola's masterpiece, Germinal, a testament to the virtues of capitalism.

A liveable Earth? Look up "nine planetary boundaries". The "biogeochemical boundary" especially pertains to the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, both necessary to plants. Nitrogen- and phosphorus-supplying fertilizer is energy intensive to produce and toxic in wide-area run-off. Some crops live in a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, so scientists are actively researching ways of engineering that abiility into other crops -- which would greatly reduce the need for producing fixed nitrogen for fertilizer, which, in turn, would greatly reduce the need for the high fossil-fuel-consuming method of generating fixed nitrogen for fertilizer, thus helping out on the global warming front. It's not all about cost.

Wait a minute! Douglas Hofstadter predates Plato??!! I learn something new everyday! :)

I'm having a little trouble interpreting (pun a happy happenstance!) your comment. Judging whether an application of a law is "appropriate" basically gives judges free rein to do whatever they want, although I can't think of a better description of what judges should do. (I suppose your use of "literally" is problematic in that, as used, it simply refers to your definition of a judge's responsibillity but is easily conflated with other posters' use of "literal" in the sense of the judge not doing any "interpretation" of the law.)

Gorsuch infamously ruled that the application of contract law (I guess, IANAL) was appropriate against a man who chose not to freeze to death by staying with his stranded work vehicle. I imagine a lot of other judges thought it was inappropriate and would have ruled in favor of the employee.

Taking into account what a judge thinks lawmakers meant to say also gives the judges a lot of wiggle room in their pronouncements.

Your list of 5 things that matter is commendable. However, the last 3 things have been torn to shreds over the past 4 decades -- and were never that strong historically, either in the U.S. or elsewhere. Tradition and precedent are easily side-stepped when convenient. And, of course, you have the infamous Supreme Court decision effectively placing Bush in the White House that explicitly said it was not to be used as a precedent.

And, of course, everything gets thrown out when corruption comes into play!

Nuker was basically apologizing for the poor phrasing in his parent comment; smoldesu understandably used the same phrasing in his correction to make his point, but, in doing so, his correction suffered from the poor phrasing too. The subjects of the sentences were "half/all of mobile users", which, in the latter case for example, implies that everyone uses iOS. Nuker's intention was to refer to "iOS mobile users" only, not mobile users in general. Kudos to him for rereading his original and going "Oops! :)".

(Late, I know -- a comment in this thread was referenced a few days later.) Yeah, 2008 was a banner year for the U.S. economy (not to mention the world economies). The economy was humming along so smoothly that, IIRC, McCain was able to take a vacation from his busy presidential campaign for a little rest and relaxation. And then Obama had to come along and ruin everything. Bummer! :(

Thank you for your insight! What about ship size? I don't remember if I saw this previously on HN or if it was a path I went down trying to find out the height of the Baltimore Beltway bridge in Maryland. The issue I came across was that container ships are being built so big now that fewer ports can handle them because of the gigantic gantries that need to be installed and the increased complexity of the automation -- both of which you discuss -- plus dredging, etc. With the smaller ships in the past, a surge in ships could be distributed among more ports up and down the coast, thus alleviating problems like we're seeing. Now, the ships are too big for many ports, which is to the advantage of the big ports/ship-owners who profit from their monopoly.

(I brought up the Baltimore bridge height because, in looking it up, I ran across some articles about the delivery of the new, giant gantries at the Port of Baltimore from China, similar to your Houston example. The ship made its way carefully and successfully underneath the longer Chesapeake Bay Bridge and also the Baltimore Beltway bridge, with only a few feet to spare in both cases. Obviously, this was all carefully coordinated with the local authorities and experts. What I found especially interesting was that the "ship" was also very wide. Very long booms or whatever were stretched out horizontally and perpendicular to the ship. My memory is that these were part of the gantries and they were lowered to further decrease the height of the ship, but maybe the booms are normally this way on the ship to keep it from becoming too top-heavy? [I should watch the YouTube you provided of Houston!] Anyway, this took me off on tangents on the internet reading more and more about the ships and the ports.)

I too miss the good old days before the FDA was established. If a person taking a lethal snakeoil medicine dies, he has only himself to blame (posthumously).

If one dismisses psychological disorders as "weird lizard brain hurty emotions", then, yes, teaching children "healthy communication" (whatever that is) and "what emotions are" will solve all our problems ... once we figure out the "gold standard", of course.

Bertrand Meyer's Object-Oriented Software Construction. A classic, written in an engaging style that makes the book very readable and conveys important ideas about programming and software engineering (and object-oriented thinking too!). The first edition was perfect. The second edition exploded in size and I never read the full book; I dipped in and read several sections and they were pure Bertrand Meyer, so I have no doubt the second edition is as good as the first, just longer. The book was published c. 1990, but it's a classic for good reason and would be just as useful now as it was then.

Also, as jes noted in another comment, SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) is a must-have and must-read.

Yes, the younger generation will not be prepared for the meritocracy that awaits them out in the real world.

Really. It's been a couple of decades, but when I used to do a lot of Tcl programming, I too noticed that coding in Tcl had a certain Lispish quality to it.

That's a reasonable way to look at it, but there is a missing component. In the early 1990s, I was a subcontractor at a large firm which had software people who were only interested in designing software, down to a medium-level pseudocode, after which the design was handed off to coders. These designers were great people, but, on this project, none of the firm's designers and coders had hands-on knowledge of and experience with the hardware and operating system (an early version of VxWorks). The coders would gain this knowledge and experience from writing and testing the software, but not so the designers.

My missing component was that there was no mind-to-mind feedback loop conveying this knowledge and experience gained by the coders back to the designers, from which it would inform the designers' future designs. (And there was no regular feedback about how well the design fit the problem and if the design required radical changes during coding and testing, although some of that is more an administrative concern than a technical one.) The "coders", by the way, were quite capable of designing their own programs - and did. I don't know why the firm had this subset of design-only'ers; they were smart and maybe the firm wanted to hang on to them and maybe "coding" roles were intended for brand new employees.

Shades of the 1980s and prior decades! In the 1980s, I worked in the aerospace division of a Fortune 5 company. A headhunter called me up, was chatting, and asked me what I did. I said I was a "programmer". Silence on the other end and then, "Are there any people who design programs there?" "Umm, yeah, we all do." I was book-aware of this distinction in previous decades, but this was the first time I had encountered it in the real world (of a headhunter). I see that we "programmers" are still regarded as being like the streetsweepers in Victorian London, sweeping out a path in the manure and mud for the software engineers! :) (We had software architects back then.)

You're confused: the annual "deficit" and the total "national debt" are two different things. The deficit is the difference between income and spending in a fixed time period. The national debt is the cumulative amount owed.

A balanced budget (i.e., zero deficit) or even a large but insufficient surplus doesn't stop the national debt growing. It's like a credit card. Even if every month you pay off what you spent the previous month (balanced budget), the interest keeps compounding on the principal you owe and your total debt keeps growing. Unless the government makes a serious effort at paying off the interest and paying down the principal, the national debt will keep growing. (Of course, the principal plus interest becomes the new principal on each compounding cycle, so the principal is a moving target.)

Maybe I misunderstand, but if a product breaks regularly under "fragile and bespoke" testing, won't it break just as often, and probably more often, under robust and comprehensive testing? And if the product fails tests, who better to "just" troubleshoot the problems than the developers? (Perhaps you mean things break after nominal testing and subsequent release, but that's just shifting the time when the issues are detected -- the product still has the issues either way. And if the issues will adversely and/or significantly affect the customer, I imagine one's employer would prefer that you set aside your non-troubleshooting valuable time and fix the issues.)

>... a vehicle that has shown generational abilities to generate growth and returns and beat deflationary effects ...

The stock market? "Appears to show" - FIFY. I'm reminded of the periodic 401(k) presentations at our company before I retired; the pitchperson would always put up the same, tired, old, vague graph of the stock market rising at a 45-degree angle from the Great Depression to the present time. But that's not really true, is it? Indexes like the DJIA are mathematical models that get reformulated periodically and the suite of companies included in an index also changes over time. I believe this is called cherry-picking the data.

Actual investors in individual stocks or mutual funds have no guarantee of generational growth, of course. In NYT's Justin Fox's book about the stock market, IIRC, he said that equity mutual funds had an annual average growth rate a little above 2% between 1984 and the early 2000s, while the S&P 500's annual growth rate averaged about 12%. (Dates and growth rates are approximate as I don't have the book at hand). 401(k)ers didn't exactly make out like bandits.

Unrelated to the trailer issue, but everyday we should thank our lucky stars that there's no such thing as "stupid private sector bureaucrats exerting their petty, ignorant power like the Gods they think they are."

It's been a good while since I read Guns, Germs & Steel (and Diamond's equally excellent Collapse), but my remembrance is that physical obstacles in the north/south-oriented Americas and Africa -- e.g., deserts and extremely dense jungles -- inhibited the relatively "easy" transfer (given time) of technology, culture, etc. that happened in Eurasia. Climate would have affected the exchange of domesticated animals and plants to some extent, but such animals and plants or variants seem to have adapted to different climates in Eurasia. (It's been a while and I haven't read the Wikipedia article, so take what I say with a grain of salt!)

Wow! I think we would all like to come work for that perfect organization where you've found a place. Perhaps I am the only person in the world who has ever heard the phrase "office politics", but, in my experience, as ileight2 says in an earlier comment, internal politics can supersede any other consideration (including money!) in any country, market, organization, and time period.

I've found myself, peers, superiors, etc. to be on bell curves with respect to sharpness, being open to new ideas, articulateness, being able to see through buzzwords and BS, etc. Some people are good in some areas and not quite as good in other areas. Pair a "used car salesman" peer (articulate, not so bright, looking to their own advantage) with a "gullible buyer" superior (not so sharp, can't detect that they're being played) and your "better-suited" ideas that rise to the top truly are mediocre, bad, or outright wrong with respect to whatever characteristic "better-suited" applies. Of course there are examples of good ideas being well-received and acted upon, but don't pretend that only the cream rises to the top or that there are only isolated instances of the dregs rising to the top.

Except that doing so does NOT avoid signed overflow. You're converting effectively w-1 bits of precision (plus a sign bit) to w bits of precision, doing the calculation, and then converting w bits of precision back to w-1 bits of precision -- that only works for a limited range of input values.

Using int32_t and uint32_t, try adding -2147483648 and -1. The arithmetic result should be -2147483649, but a program converting back and forth between signed and unsigned will produce 2147483647 -- wrong answer and wrong sign.

I didn't read the blog post you linked to. It appears from the date in the link that the guy analyzed temperature data from 1890 to 2010, roughly. He threw out out data from weather stations that hadn't been continuously in service for at least 100 years -- to "stabilize" the dataset. This implies that NASA (or whoever compiled the data) hadn't already analyzed and corrected the data to ensure that the readings (i) over the 120-year span and (ii) from disparate locations and different instruments were commensurable. If so, limiting his exercise to 100-year-plus stations provides a surface veneer of illusory "stability", but doesn't speak to the accuracy of the reduced or full dataset -- and the accuracy is key to conclusions that can be drawn from analysis. (And if NASA did analyze and correct the readings in the full dataset, then the guy is cherry-picking.)

The guy then drastically restricts the dataset to only include rural weather stations, to less than a quarter of the original set of 100-year+ stations. At the least, there has to be some accounting of geograpical distribution in the analysis. The bigger question, though, is why would he remove the urban heat islands? Does their effect on the climate stop at the city limits, with a partition rising straight up into space? The whole concern about climate change is whether human activity (which certainly includes urban heat islands) will eventually lead to irreversible climate change that will have catastrophic effects.

(If folks feel "catastrophic" is alarmist, I suggest they Google "nine planetary boundaries", of which climate change is but one of the interdependent boundaries, for some truly alarming reading.)

Anyway, someone more knowledgeable than me can perhaps provide a better perspective on whether any climate-/weather-related elements have more of a role than temperature in affecting the initiation and spreading of forest fires. I'm particularly thinking of low humidity and drought caused by climate-change-induced storms, winds, etc. Are forest fires less likely to occur in cooler regions experiencing low humidity and drought?

Aah, starik36 and Excel Hero have gotten me interested in researching further; thank you, sincerely!