Citation needed there I think.

Mostly on the back of following George W Bush on his crazy adventures. Of course, the government at the time was being led by a Scot and the man in charge of the money was a Scot too.

OpenSSL is written in C. I am a competent C programmer. I don't think I could maintain that code base. The Open BSD people are probably more competent C programmers than me and they felt they couldn't maintain the code base without first ripping most of it out.

Also Rugby football with two subdivisions (league and union) and Gaelic football.

Bite me...

The majority of people who work in office environments in large organisations have computers that are locked down in some way. You can't tell them to just download Libre Office because they are not allowed to.

Apart from the European arrest warrant.

The UK won't extradite Assange unless the USA asks us to. Have you heard of any extradition requests form the USA yet? No, neither have I. Assange isn't afraidd of the Americans, he is afraid of the Swedish, specifically, he's not sure he will be found innocent of the rape charges.

No. If you are driving a car, the police can stop you for any reason and you must present your documents (driver's licence, registration, MoT and insurance). But you don't have to carry them on you and if you don't you need to present them at a police station within seven days. This only applies to the driver.

At other times, the police have the power to stop and question you at any time. They can also search you, if they have reasonable grounds to believe you are carrying drugs, a weapon, stolen goods or something used to commit crimes (I guess any tools would count there). But you are not obliged to show them any identification.

In fact many people don't carry photo id around. There are no id cards and older style British driving licences don't even have a photograph on them. I got a new driving licence with my photograph on it last year and that was only because a photo licence will be mandatory from 2015.

I think, with your attitude, I'll leave it.

Please tell me what Open Source project(s) you work on so that I can comply.

Javadoc isn't meant to add to the source, it is supposed to be instead of the source. You shouldn't need to read and decipher the source code in order to use an API.

The perennial joke is that EMACS is a great operating system, all it needs is a decent text editor. However, that's really unfair, you can get a vi emulation module for it now.

Since Google makes no money from the people who do the searching but lots of money from advertisers, I'd question your definition of usefulness, at least from the point of view of Google and its customers.

The problem is that different humans have different ideas about exactly what white space to use and where. For instance, for brace indentation, I prefer Allman style whereas most people go with some variant of K&R style.

The other problem is that white space is actually invisible to humans and glancing at a piece of code that is indented, a we cannot tell how many white space characters are there. Think of make files where it matters if the indent is made of tab or space characters. For human readability, the number and type of white space characters (including line feeds) should make no difference to the meaning of the code. If you need to enforce a project standard, there are tools that can do that and that obviate the source of errors that you think Python eliminates.

I disagree. When somebody is learning how to program, you wan the language to be as easy to use as possible. You want to be able to solve real problems with a minimum amount of "boiler plate" and extraneous concepts.

For instance, in Java, you cannot write anything without having a class, so you have to introduce classes and methods (including static ones) to the beginner right at the start. Whereas with Python, you can pretty much type statements that do things straight away.

Also, you want the error messages to be simple and descriptive in terms that a beginner can understand. So when you index off the end of an array, you want the computer to print an error message that says "you've indexed off the end of the array", not to silently scribble over the process's memory.

This is not to say that Java and C don't have their place, they are just less suitable as a first teaching language than Python.

*I'm* Jon Skeet and so's my wife.