wonderzombie

Whether you like it or not, you derive innumerable tangible benefits from living in American society, in no small part because generations before you paid for it. You're probably white, male, hetero, relatively young, and relatively healthy, and none of the advantages which accrued to you because of that are due to your life choices. Arguably, you have the sense of entitlement exactly backwards.

Long story short, some people question the idea that people who are successful deserve what they have merely because they have it, and that those who do are unsuccessful deserve to be poor because, in a word, they're meritless. Furthermore, some people want society at large to acknowledge the role chance and circumstance play in whether or not someone is successful.

Your last complaint is so old it's a cliche.

Contrariwise people are sick of being told they're "meritless" because of circumstances beyond their control-- the deck is stacked against you if you happen to fall into one of many less-than-fortunate categories.

While it might have been awesome at the time (I loved Ultima IV) I'm not a kid anymore. I don't have summer vacation. I also don't have ADHD. What I do have is an hour a day to play a game before bed, so that game damn well better make it worth my while.

Besides, the consistent popularity of MMOs and particularly MOBAs belies the whole idea of ADHD as driving factor. Both reward a large investment of time & mastery. And both are practically PC-only.

First, Vim emulation widgets vary a great deal in quality, supporting different, disjoint subsets of Vim functionality. Just as an example, ideaVim doesn't support Ctrl-W for navigating between panes. The deeper your knowledge of Vim, the more diminishing returns you get.

Second, Sublime Text's Vintage mode supports enough of my Vim workflow that it's actually made me faster with Vim and other Vim emulation widgets. To the extent that any Vim emulation mode overlaps with Vim, I have improved across the board. Of course this is true mostly for the less deep features IME.

Just take it for what it is. It's one act of kindness. Buying a sandwich for a homeless person doesn't mean every homeless person is now entitled to a sandwich from you.

But this isn't a productive framing.

As much as we wish presidential administrations could make or break the economy -- it makes partisan sense, and it makes us think at least someone could run the show if they got their shit together -- it just isn't so. The current recession has its roots going much farther back than 2008. Depending on how you reckon, someone who's now 27 was either not yet conceived or in diapers when the bubble began inflating.

Likewise no amount of perseverance, hard work, temerity, gumption, or whatever the hell you want to call it, can wish the economy back to the '90s.

But the meta-reason is: if someone thinks they can get away with it, why wouldn't they do it? With that presumption you could even argue it's the rational choice. If you do it subtly, there's plenty of room for doubt. Furthermore, there are enough people who're invested for ideological reasons that, in the absence of strong evidence, all most people will hear is a lot of he-said, she-said.

More to the point, factor in any monetary investment in the scheme -- the prospect of collapse should a critical mass reach the same conclusion, for instance -- and the people who've invested have an incentive to stay the course. That incentive to maintain a good reputation cuts both ways. Reputation is a matter of popular perception.

Of course a complex language can be used to write simple code and vice versa. Ultimately every program is going to increase in complexity-- that quote about failure vs legacy nightmare applies here.

IMHO it's better to reduce the complexity of the language to a minimum so that language/runtime complexity doesn't have a multiplicative effect on application code complexity.

For instance, C++ is a complex language. That complexity inevitably accrues to applications written in C++. This is a conscious trade-off of the language -- performance + high level programming, or what have you.

In the end, though, I am not sure I'd argue there's much correlation between simplicity of the language and simplicity of the code. It's too hard to get anyone to agree on what simple means anyway. Me, I prefer Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" for that, but not everyone agrees.

ETA: I guess what I would say is: would you prefer to start with something simpler and build complexity appropriate to the problem domain out of simple, but sound ideas? Or would you prefer to start with a set of inherently complex primitives and build something else complex on top of that? It's subjective, but I've probably leaked my bias in the phrasing.

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

That's reductive. Not everyone has the bandwidth to sort through every iota of evidence. And the fact is that there's no shortage of people who have little in arguing in good faith. So people resort to heuristics such as reputation, credibility, what other "reputable" people say, etc.

Korean was kind of revelatory for me. Maybe I don't know what all the words mean, but being able to sound them out Hangul is far more rewarding than it ought to be.