BenDaglish

A well-written tutorial, but mildly annoying that it starts off with a basic off-by-one error; 9am to 9pm is 13 trips, not 12, so the total trip number is 52 (which indeed is the number of trips shown in the example, not 48 as stated just above).

They're describing the space in between the notes... so 4 equally spaced notes would have 3 gaps of 1:1:1 . It is indeed a bit confusing, as it says nothing about the duration of the last note, which to my ears would be an intrinsic part of the pattern.

> Are you really referring to a tenant of Marxism

Marxism's taking in lodgers now?

I don't think there's the same feeling of "community" with Go as with other languages, in the same way that there's not really a C community - more a bunch of authors, evangelists and contributors who have a "stake" in the language. That's sort of the point, though. Go doesn't really need much more than it has already. It's a deliberately simple language, with standard format and documentation, a plethora of examples and a comprehensive stdlib. It was designed to serve particular purposes, and it does what it does really well. All it really needs in the way of community is a bugtracker and a StackOverflow section, and I suspect that the a lot of the "Go community are arrogant/negative/dismissive" type complaints can just be attributed to it being the same few people hearing the same complaints about lack of My Favourite Feature X over and over, despite the many blog posts, release notes and list discussions explaining why it's not there.

Haha - beat me to it!

>makes it seem like parents who formula-feed are harming their children

Well, if the studies are to be believed, then that's exactly what is happening. I completely understand the "pressure on mothers" argument, but I'm not sure that really flies, especially given the (albeit more subtle these days due to legislation) opposite pressure put on mothers by Nestlé and the rest.

I also find the fact that initial breastfeeding rates vary so wildly by country (from 98% in Sweden though to 57% in the US) interesting, and again more likely to do with commercial and social pressures of the same kind than to do with physical differences between mothers worldwide. While-ever the argument is presented as "Breast is Best" rather than "Artificial is Worst", I suspect this will continue.

It interests me that the conclusion of these studies is almost always presented as breastfeeding increasing IQ (or conveying health benefits or whatever). Surely, breastfeeding is the norm, and this headline should be "Bottle feeding linked to lower IQ"?

I messed up - I meant 2001-02-03 04:05:06 , in which case 2:05PM would be format "4:05PM", (or 16:05) . All that'd happen would be the year and seconds swap order in the "123456" format - but as I said, it's a minor quibble.

Personally, when I first read the spec. for time.Format, I thought "well how bleedin' sensible is that?!" The only thing that annoys me is that it isn't in ISO order (I'd have preferred 2001-02-03 14:05:06 ), but all that you need to remember is "2006-01" and the rest just falls naturally into place. I've seen a couple of "complaints" about this over the last few days, and I just don't understand what the problem is. It's logical and neat.

> Facts remain facts even if we don't like them.

It depends not only on your definition of "facts", but on the interpretation of the same, and how that affects policy and decision making. For instance, these too are all "facts".

"Poor people have lower IQ's than rich people"

"Americans have lower IQ's than the Japanese, Italians, Mongolians, British, Austrians and many many others"

"More men have high IQ's than women" (more men in the top 10%)

"More men have low IQ's than women" (more men in the bottom 10%)

"As pirates decrease, global warming increases"

The real point, and something that Paul completely missed in his essay, is that we now analyse these things with a greater degree of historically-informed sophistication. Your statement could just as well read "On average, when given a written test invented by white men over 100 years ago, a sample group consisting of historically enslaved, disenfranchised and under-educated people of African heritage in the United States performed less well than a sample of their European-descended counterparts". Indeed, I'm sure that's true. The leap though to racism, which is making blanket assumptions about people based on skin colour, is completely fallacious.

Perl :)