Then there are all the incentives to make traffic worse... stop light cameras that generate revenue but don't increase safety because the yellows are too short. Or the urban legend that shopkeepers push to get lights timed so more cars are stopped out in front of their shops, an idea that's believable, although I don't know if it's true. Then of course, there are bad driving habits, and the fact that one tailgater or one slowpoke can cause major cascades that lead to huge backups (and I'm not talking about accidents).

I'm a developer. Honestly, I've never worked anywhere that did much in the way of automated testing. It's something that's always bugged me and something I've always pushed for.

As a former violist, I heartily endorse your comment.

Heh. I'm tempted to say that with C++ you can get a huge unreadable mess of error messages, but with Java, the huge unreadable mess you get is the code, but that's not fair to the language.

I've been doing C++ on and off (mostly on) for 20 years. I'm on the fence about whether or not it's great. I definitely like it, and I think the right subset of C++ is great, but the right subset changes over time (e.g., you couldn't have paid me to use templates and STL 12 years ago), but now I couldn't live without them, and it definitely changes for different people.

In fact, it really is the language's problem. C++ in its entirety is just too complex, and therefore, depending on the code, it can be way too hard to deal with. Of course, Java is a much simpler language and you can hardly do a Google search without seeing someone complain about how so much Java code is like dealing with the Soviet bureaucracy (an accurate description in my experience). I guess C++ makes good developers better and bad developers worse... and that is because of the language.

My language of choice these days would be Python and if I do anything for fun, it's with Python. I think Python is a far more elegant language, as well as simpler than C++, but doesn't lack the ability to be really expressive, usually with much less code. There are obviously issues with Python, too, it's not my intention to start a flame war, but as much as I like C++, I think a lot of its problems _are_ the fault of the language.

> Misplace a semicolon in a non-trivial meta-program or dsl in C++

Well, I see one obvious problem here...

Programming is math, I agree. But doing anything productive with code someone else has written is most definitely an art.

Science, industry - or is it really an art?

I've been doing it for more than 25 years... I consider it a vice.

"Automated unit tests"... I thought those were just a myth. Are you sure you're in the Real World?

And don't get me started on "enterprise" software. I've almost never seen "enterprise" software that was worth the disk space it took up. We can complain all day about how bad Windows or Office, etc., is but compared to "enterprise" software, those products are amazingly good and user-friendly.

I can assure you that when "Star Wars" was first shown in theaters, there was no mention of "Episode IV". That was a later addition.

Yes, because streaming music into your car sound system will instantly kill you.

You can say what you want about Abrams' ability to make exciting action set pieces. He's got a lot of technical and artistic skill in that area. I think there's a lot of good that can be defended about the casting and art direction of the new "Star Trek" movies (disclaimer: I've only seen clips of "Khan Lite"). I would even go so far as to praise some of the changes that came out of the "reboot" aspect of altering the timeline.

But the plots were absolutely and utterly incoherent. Then again, this is true for most action movies nowadays. I'm not talking about "Oh, there's a plot hole", but more along the lines of "Nothing that happens makes any sense, other than to be a thin substrate linking interchangeable action scenes."

That "Episode IV" stuff was put in after the fact. Years after the movie was first released.

4,294,967,296 Internets to you sir! That's all the internets!

You know, with IPv6, you get 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 internets.

Some things die so slowly it seems you have to literally wait for the actual users to die. IE6 is one of those things. Flash is another.