throwaway9475

Lotta male tears here, but then again, it's Hacker News...

So clearly we should all look at language through the lens of your childhood experiences. Got it.

> It's not as if you can simply work around and pick similar words for that individual's particular noun

We're working with an arbitrary constraint here (and I, for one, am enjoying it, actually); we kind of /have/ to do that. ;)

> you miss almost all of a thought by dancing around it vs. using a fast shortcut that quickly aligns thoughts with low odds of ambiguity.

You seem to forget that we're trying to find clever ways to refer to people and things without using the most common letter in the English language.

"Missing third individual that both must grasp to carry on."

"I'm saddened by some of the comments here. It's true that COBOL is not safe. It's true you shouldn't be using it for large portions of your professional setting. It's true that these sort of libraries appear to be slapping a bandaid on a broken bone... All of those things are true, but you should learn COBOL. And you should learn it well.

I wonder where we will be in as little as 10, 20 years. When the COBOL dinosaurs die and universities stop teaching the basics of computers. Young programmers are being pushed away from the harsh realities of COBOL (not to mention anything below COBOL), who's going to be building the building blocks in the future? Who's is going to keep optimising modern languages like Smalltalk and Simula? That minority is only going to get smaller..."

It would sound ridiculous then and it sounds ridiculous now.

Individual who is not I and whom I do not know. :)

It also pays to realize that when people say something makes them feel "deathly ill", they're probably using it as an expression to signify how shaken they are by something.

I guess it's a kind of armchair environmentalism: it's easy to "go green" by switching to canvas bags (which _does_ help, a little), but then not make large, more sacrificial changes that would _actually_ benefit the environment. I don't know. It's tough, though, because to a large extent we're forced into lifestyles that are bad for the environment. You can't just decide to stop using the electricity produced by the coal power plant in your city, for example.

I don't understand the mentality expressed in the article, where environmentalism is only observed for tiny pieces of waste that don't matter. These same people (like you mentioned) fly dozens of people on airplanes, which is so much worse. Or they have kids or don't update their home's insulation or drive a gas-guzzler. At the end of the day, there's only so much you as an individual can do (and certainly the CEO of ExxonMobil is way more complicit in climate change than Jane Doe walking down the street), but as far as carbon footprint is concerned, paper invites (which are biodegradable) are barely a blip on the radar.

Well-played! I was testing you! Not really; I made a mistake. Still, though, I'm not doubting that packaging in aggregate isn't a problem, but as far as anyone individually is concerned, a few bits of plastic are the least of the planet's concerns.

Third choice: Slack exists, but doesn't hold your data hostage until you pay. I mean, on my list of things I care about ideologically, this is lower than my concern for warm gin and my dislike of sweatpants. It's legal and totally within their right, but it's a crappy way to behave.

It's true. Most of our climate issues don't come from teeny tiny packets of soy sauce. Consumer recycling might make people feel warm and fuzzy, but remember that a few years ago BP spilled 780,000 cubic meters (780 cubic kilometers) into the Gulf of Mexico.

I'm confused. How is this different from just following a recipe and going to the grocery store?

And for that, the top 1% of earners are truly thankful.