F3nd0

I don’t see them providing any kind of reasoning behind their dismissal here, but if perchance you meant `cowlevel`, then I understand and thank you for the clarification!

Huh? How is Anubis close to erotica? I’m not seeing any hints of eroticism.

GNU/Linux was very quick to support the format, followed by Apple, but Windows and Android still don’t support it out of the box.

Even C and C++ can be memory-safe if you need them to [1], but is arbitrary code execution strictly about memory safety only?

  [1] https://fil-c.org/

For personal use, if those are your only two choices, then go with H.265 for higher efficiency, or H.264 for wider compatibility. If other codecs are an option, go with AV1 for higher efficiency. It’s currently the best and already pretty widely supported.

With JPEG XL finally being allowed into mainstream web browsers, we’ll hopefully see more native platform support and be able to slowly phase every older codec out, since JPEG XL does very well at more or less everything (except for animation, compared to video codecs).

Why?

Other than Ada/SPARK, which languages can guarantee this won’t happen?

I assume the reason was more generally non-permissive licensing and legal issues? Specifically seeing only copyleft as the problem sounds unreasonably sociopathic, so I assume you picked that out as just one prominent example. (That, or I should take care to steer clear of NetBSD.)

I don’t feel like the sentence structure in English is particularly flexible. It relies on word order for things other languages prefer to express with cases, prepositions, or context.

I think the disparity between the written and spoken language is big enough of a problem to make the language difficult; certainly not less so than extra verb forms or gender in other languages. For example, I don’t find French remarkably more difficult than English, because even though it has both of those features, reading it is fairly straightforward, which makes the language so much more comfortable.

Another part of English that I personally always found challenging (and which still trips me up from time to time) are the verb tenses. Just wrapping my head around them and all the context switching to know which one to use for the past/present/future relative to what I’m talking about right now. Perhaps most people don’t feel as strongly about them, though.

All that said, I consider English among the easier languages to learn, but still quite challenging. Difficulty-wise, one can do far, far better.

The important detail being that this surveillance only concerns merchant income, not customer payments. Omitting that is bound to give people the wrong idea whenever you call it a ‘surveillance system’. :-)

(And I still doubt whether the term ‘backdoor’ really makes sense in this context.)

It’s also the most successful attempt of its kind, by far. Which might be a little depressing, but hey, at least the language is still alive and well and not totally unknown! That’s something. :-)

I wouldn’t call English especially easy and forgiving. Why would you?

Well, any language becomes relatively easy when you learn by immersion. That’s how I finally managed to learn English with little effort, after struggling with it for years. Doesn’t mean the language in and of itself is easy. And it most certainly isn’t neutral; just the fact that it’s the native language of several countries and an inherent vehicle of cultural influence disqualifies it as such.

I’m not in any way doubting the success of English as a widespread second language, I just find it unfortunate we haven’t gone with an easy, neutral language instead.

Edge case or not, I do consider a dependency on user-hostile proprietary software owned and controlled by foreign companies a serious problem by nature. Most people not caring doesn’t make it any better.