Maybe businesses should pay a tax that goes into paying a respectable universal basic income.
That would make it easier to develop and maintain such software, and it would make it easier for people doing other things besides software development (yes, they exist) to open up their artware without starving.
Then there wouldn't be a need for the insane "professional" formalism described in this blog post.
You can also write useful software without getting paid. Simply don't share it. Indeed, that's one way to spend your time when you're not seeking employment.
The article says that if you care about the web, you should care about Firefox. I disagree, because my "web" is probably not Batsov's "web". What is "the web" for me? Well, I'd say it's IRC, torrents, mailing lists, git repositories, oh and mostly-textual websites. I use Firefox for the latter, but for most of them I wouldn't mind using emacs-w3m instead. Unfortunately GitHub turned into a shitty JavaScript Web App, and many people still use it so I need to interact with it at times. So yeah, I care about having a Firefox version that can work with it. It doesn't need to be updated every week with the latest user-hostile interface changes. It doesn't need endless security updates, because JavaScript is disabled by default. I don't care about Firefox qua product anymore, because it too turned into a piece of trash long ago. I definitely don't care about the Mozillas. The only reason I still use it is that some mostly-textual websites are too shitty to run in a basic browser like emacs-w3m.
Hold on, Batsov's article is specifically about Web. Web is a hyperlinked document system accessed through the browser (modern WWW has an app layer on top of that, but it's not the point). IRC, torrents, e-mail, and git are not part of the Web.
Yes, I know. I thought about it after I posted. I wanted to emphasize that "web" can be a small part of Internet use, so a browser's importance is placed in a wider perspective. The rest of my comment talks about its importance within that niche, though.
You told sushsjsuauahab that he/she is a small minority of people.
I'm sure that makes sushsjsuauahab and others who have their own (gasp) reasons not to get the vaccine feel better...
See, it's this one-size-fits-all dictum backed by sanctions that's the problem.
The vaccines help prevent sickness, but government policies hurt healthy people.
Dunno about other countries but in NZ you can apply for medical exemption from vaccine mandates. A panel of medical professionals evaluates your situation and if they agree, you get a vaccine pass that works the same as for a vaccinated person.
I don't mind taking a 0.5% risk to avoid 1% of my life spent in lockdown.
Neither does my mother or grandmother.
It is not an axiom that an increase in death rates at the population level is bad, because people are willing to put their lives at a small risk in order to preserve some semblance of meaning in them.
This is a point lost on essentially every lockdown proponent as far as I can tell. They are fundamentally unwilling to accept differing value systems and seek to enforce theirs.
You can't outlaw math, but you can make outlaws of people learning, using, or teaching math. You are saying the Clipper chip "didn't work", and that's true, but it wasn't "last time". Since then, many attempts were made and many did succeed, and we have Snowden and other whistleblowers to remind us of that fact. So you can downplay this current attempt all you want, but some people don't want their chocolate cookie recipes exposed to everyone just yet (maybe just in the Netherlands).
It's not just science, but also technology and other areas of research. Bigco throws money at some technological choices (think programming languages, or methods of machine learning, or fields like distributed computing, cryptography), and academia follows to dance at that pole. As a result, research becomes synonymous with advancing current industry choices, and all alternatives become obscure, even undignified.
Of course, if you pass a fixnum and the result cannot actually be stored in a fixnum, that's no good. So you need to either handle that case or not make such a declaration.
> Compatibility note: This construct is borrowed from the Interlisp DECL package; Interlisp, however, allows an implicit progn after the type specifier rather than just a single form. The MacLisp fixnum-identity and flonum-identity constructs can be expressed as (the fixnum x) and (the single-float x).
Right, though I'm not sure it's easy to infer an ordinary function's return type from this kind of declaration.
Speaking of return types, do you have any idea if any implementation takes a generic function's return type declaration seriously? I believe SBCL currently doesn't, which is unfortunate (defmethods keep clobbering the ftype declaration).
