tdees40

This is totally true. The downside, of course, is just how much code exists that is written in pre-C++11 dialects, and how many programmers are trained to write that sort of code.

I like way more of C++11 than I liked of the prior version, but there's just so much that's accumulated over the years. I wonder if breaking backwards compatibility is the key, but then I look at Python 3 and think, well, probably not.

Perl is a (3) as it was the scripting language on *Nix, and CGI was pretty crucial in the early web.

Ruby I guess is a (3): Rails is a killer app.

C, well, it's the a major accomplishment of human civilization and has held up for half a century. I'd call that idiosyncratic.

See CPython, Haskell, C++....

There really are only three ways to create a usable language, honestly:

1) Huge institutional support. See: C#, Java, Go.

2) Give it 20 years. See: Python, Haskell.

3) Weird, idiosyncratic factors. See: Javascript, mostly.

So it's hard for me to get excited about these sorts of things.

Edit: fair point, Javascript is really a case of #1, with Netscape as the institution.

Sighs. I wish Nimrod were more popular. It seems like a better version of D. But there can only be so many languages with a fully functioning ecosystem, and I just doubt Nimrod will ever get there. It seems to be a one-man shop at this point (as this demonstrates):

https://github.com/Araq/Nimrod/graphs/contributors

I'll bite: a relevant technical question would be: is D really that much better than C++11 that you should abandon C++ (with all of the consequences that would have on tooling/libraries/etc.)?

I think D made more sense pre-C++11.

D? It's been around for a fairly long time, and it doesn't really have much momentum. I'm not sure why it's "the next big programming language".

It's a fantastic blog. Lots of data, minimal bloviating.

I started programming using a copy of vintage 1998ish Visual Basic that my dad had on our computer. I drew a button, and then I clicked it, and I added code that gets run when the button is clicked. That was awesome! I built useful, visual programs in a matter of hours from when I started.

Now, I want to teach a friend, and it's Python + HTML + CSS + JavaScript to get anything cool going. That's a high bar, and a huge part of me misses the sweet simplicity of VB. I can't imagine breaking in today.

I'm not clear on how any of this will lead to a recession. Why will high Debt-to-GDP or government spending send the economy into a recession?

Q1 GDP numbers were clearly affected by dismal weather (although still bad), but labor markets are improving markedly, and there are reasons for optimism. I don't see this as a very convincing bear case.

For the bull case, see this post, from a guy who's been right about everything since the mid-2000s.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2014/06/the-future-is-stil...

Would love to! But my employer probably wouldn't be so thrilled about it.

Scipy optimization libraries primarily.

I'm currently porting a Numpy project into haskell as a self-improvement project, and it's been 69% great. But then I find some library that I have to implement from scratch when I just had it in python. That's a pretty big problem, and I'm willing to put up with it, but most people aren't.

The best thing I can recommend is taking some code you put together and rewriting it in a drastically different language that you don't know. I rewrote some Python code I put together in Haskell, and it was a transformative experience for me.

News flash! Generally liberal college students prefer liberal commencement speakers. Hardly a surprise, really. How many college students do you know who are looking to hear from George W. Bush or Ted Cruz?

I work in finance, and I have an aesthetic love of finance. I just find it interesting. But most people who work in it have no interest whatsoever. They just want money. This means that it tends to be a joyless environment full of assholes, who think of the world in winner/loser terms.

Where I live most cyclists are poor and Hispanic. But sure, why not!

Man, this guy is going to be REALLY upset when he hears about how cars constantly speed, roll through stop signs, and text on their cell phones. I say until we get those problems stopped, we don't give cars the special treatment of having use of all lanes. We'll just shove them in the far right like we do with bikes.

I just ran the same test and got 80.8K pystones/sec (CPython) vs. 234.3K/sec (PyPy.js - Chrome, after a few warm-ups), so yeah, wow.

Wow, "writing lots of compilers and type checkers" definitely wasn't on my radar screen when I was in high school.

Sure, but I don't think that's what most people are thinking about here.

Investments get booked as assets, so they have no impact on profits. This mistake gets made frequently with respect to Amazon.

The discount is presumably also due to the fact that no one in management - least of all Marissa Mayer - has any interest in making Yahoo smaller. Although this would likely be the right thing for the shareholders, it would make their domain (and thus their perceived importance) smaller.

My favorite Marquez story is that he never used adverbs ending in -mente, so he called his English language translator (Edith Grossman) and requested that she not use any adverbs ending in -ly.

The biggest problem is just the AMA. They limit the number of doctors in America, so there are just too few. This drives up the salaries for the few doctors who live the tell the tale (but certainly don't want to go into primary care, when other more lucrative jobs are on offer), and drives up the hours for everyone.

Making it easier to become a doctor would improve things immediately (especially given the recent research that makes it clear that nurse practitioners do just fine).

My dad played football, and so did I. My child will not, because his brain is more important than football. That's anecdotal, but there are plenty more like us.

Is Musk capital constrained? Does he have projects out there that he'd like to do but can't get investors for? This seems doubtful to me. Whereas stamping out malaria is always capital constrained.

In the words of the poet Philip Larkin, we're all "stumbling up the stair/into fulfillment's desolate attic."

This might be the single greatest comment in the history of Hacker News.

My (very non-affluent) school started at 7:20, and the stated reasoning was to maximize the earnings opportunity for those students who had after-school jobs.