cia_plant

From the magazine of things that totally happened

No, actually, Java is a really bad language.

It has a very complicated type system, but doesn't even allow you to express things like function composition or generic sums at the language level.

Its syntax is stunningly verbose (e.g., no map literals; only now adding lambda literals; no type synonyms; no operator overloading).

There is no macro system or method_missing or any other way of really extending the language, except the ugly, unsafe reflection system ... so now all the libraries (Spring, Hibernate, etc.), use annotations and reflection to modify object behavior at runtime.

I think the majority of programmers are very conservative about language, they use whatever they already know, be it Java, C#, C++, ruby, etc.

A minority are more fashion-driven - if something seems like the hot new trend they'll jump on it, scoffing at the old-fashioned crap their coworkers are using. Erlang unfortunately is not fashionable, and it's hard to predict or control fashion.

A smaller minority are driven by some concept of technical merit. However, once you've strayed from the safety of Java/C#/etc., it seems like you might as well go all the way and get into Haskell, which is pretty widely seen as the most advanced, mind-expanding, powerful, futuristic programming language right now, and for good reason.

Right ... websites with tests and a staging environment never experience downtime.

What's up with the cliff anyway? You're already asking me to take a much higher level of risk and a much lower level of liquidity than I'd like in my compensation, by giving me stock options. In addition to that you want me to take on 100% of the risk of our working arrangement not working out, and in fact you insist on giving yourself a strong incentive to fire me before the first year is out? It seems ridiculously exploitative.

No, I'm simply stating the fact that there are type systems capable of encoding assertions.

All unit test assertions can be caught by a type checker.

line height is straightforward enough, if you draw text with line height on N then you should move N pixels down for the next line.

Text baseline is the tricky part - if you want to e.g. put a taller piece of text next to a shorter one, then they should be put together so they share a baseline, but there's no decent way to get the text baseline.

The hack I use is to draw the text in a hidden span, and put a 1px inline-block span next to it, and check where the 1px span ends up. This works though it is ugly.

When you're tying your square wheels together into a big circle so they turn better, it's time to start reinventing.

I've written text wrapping and responsiveness code for canvas, in javascript - I don't think the complexity is even of the same order of magnitude as React or Angular.

If you want to do immediate mode, then why would you use the DOM at all? Canvas is supported in IE9+, and is much less complicated for such applications.

There are cases where the viewpoint "Of course one side is always right and the other isn't", has been entirely correct. For example, there was real controversy for decades over the idea that cigarettes caused cancer, that second-hand smoke caused cancer, and so on. One side was mostly good-faith research and the other side was almost entirely paid shills trying to muddy the water.

Climate change seems to be mostly the same situation.

The Soviet propaganda machine is another example - it presented an intellectually sophisticated "side" which was dictated by politics, not any genuine interest in reality.

I think we have to be careful, because propagandists know that most people want to be even-handed, and they take advantage of this to make fringe views seem credible. This makes "there are two sides, the truth must be somewhere in the middle" an entirely unreliable intellectual shortcut.

So if you want to argue that US right-wing think tanks are no worse, in terms of bias and distortion, than academia, I think you need to make that case in more detailed terms, and not just dismiss the very idea that one side could be more systematically biased than another.

You seem to think that an organized political group being pretty consistently wrong is a reductio ad adsurdum...?