jbert

One difference is in "dead connection detection". How do you know that your AMQP connection is down? At some level you're polling, whether that be TCP keepalive, application keepalive or something else.

If you're doing polling, you're actually back at the same pre-webhook place - polling their server on some timescale which is a compromise between latency and load.

Yes, a TCP keepalive is generally cheaper than an HTTP long poll request, but only by a constant factor.

Isn't the calculation (assuming (for simplicity) one CPU, running at 100% only on application load)

60 requests/sec => each request takes 1/60s CPU-second == 16.6ms of CPU time to process? (This is time-on-cpu, and doesn't include time-waiting-for-cpu. I think time-on-cpu is the number you want if you're looking at optimising your codebase)

I disagree. Names are comments. You don't want more mutable state across large scopes, but using intermediate names can help comprehension.

> your business plan must make sense to the investors.

Would locking in dividends in the business plan allow the investors to become "directly involved" and make investment in a "going concern but not a unicorn" a rational choice for an investor?

> And with language support I don't have to introduce new names for each occurrence;

Having <LHS> as a name is only useful I think if you don't want to give it another name? I was asking what's the downside of giving it a name.

Is there a significant benefit to this over using a new name for the result?

    y = (x + 1) / atan(x) - x;
    x = y; // If you're in a loop and updating some value

If would hope/imagine that a compiler could reduce the two to the same code - and I don't think it reads any worse. Is there a downside beyond the extra line of code?

Is the "but at that kind of energy output we'll boil the planet" limiting case really a hard limit though?

If we're at the stage of having super-dense energy sources and super-tech, couldn't we we use those to cool the planet effectively?

Use a heat pump to move that heat off-planet? Drop some icy asteroids in the seas? Take compressed hot atmosphere off-planet in super-blimps, run it through a heat exchanger on Titan and then bring it back?

> The founders of the USA were not immigrants, they didn't immigrate to join Indian tribes, they were founders of a country.

Sorry, I'm afraid I don't understand the distinction you're drawing.

If some people move from one country to another, and the other place has people living there already, what characteristics of the move classify it as founding a country rather than immigration?

Thanks - useful point. But, I think that's more of an oddity of nested, named subs than anything else. The usual anonymous subs close as you'd expect (as you say).

I'm interested in the details of the variable scoping problems are. I'd have thought that perl's explicit declaration of lexicals with 'my' was better than "declare at first use" of javascript/python/ruby.

[There's a class of mistake where you typo a variable name which you can make in those languages which gets caught in a language where you have to declare variables.]

Does this places a reasonable selection pressure on the kinds of flying insects we can have?

Big enough to shrug off a raindrop hit, or small enough to surf along the surface tension until it can slide off?

Does it have to be an open system?

Can't the already-contaminated water be used for cooling in a mostly-closed system?

And if the expansion due to rainwater is significant, perhaps some kind of large tent arrangement?