I suggest we handcuff all airline passengers before they get on the plane. To, you know, fight terrorism and stuff. They'll be unhandcuffed when they get off the plane and it's totally their choice to put the handcuffs on or to not fly. No restriction on liberty.

They should also be stripped nude and hosed down before they're allowed on the plane. Cause they might have lice or something. They can totally refuse to go through this and just not fly if they don't like it. No restriction on liberty.

Oh, and I think everyone should have to have a microchip implanted in their hands that tracks where they go at all times and can be used by the government to deliver disabling electric shocks to anyone resisting arrest. It would totally improve public safety. But it won't restrict liberty cause you only have to have it implanted if you drive a car, ride a bike, take the bus or a taxi, have a bank account, receive Social Security or Medicare, or apply for a government ID of any kind.

So it's optional. So it won't restrict liberty.

Strongly disagree here. You're correct that rights only make sense in the context of society (there's no need for free speech if there's no one to talk to), but group interactions don't completely dominate the world. Or do you never listen to music by yourself, never read a book, never whittle (carve wood), program, sew, keep a diary, or engage in another solitary hobby, and never just sit by yourself and think about life and the universe? If that is all true for you, then you are an unusual individual. Most people's lives are not completely dominated by their interactions with others: they have internal worlds. It has nothing to do with "special snowflake syndrome" (did you just make that up?).

Nonsense. The FDA could outlaw any new, untested cosmetics, not have a procedure for testing/approving them, and no one would even blink except some wacko libertarian whiners. We've got plenty of cosmetics and we really don't as a society need anymore. Will companies keep making new ones if we let them? Yeah, of course, why not? It's a market based on monopolistic competition, meaning, essentially, that companies compete on variety and are eternally try to find and develop niches.

Will there be an underground cosmetics market like the illegal drug market if we outlaw potentially unsafe new chemicals in cosmetics and don't allow them to be tested? No, silly, of course not. Unlike, say, the underground heroin market, black market cosmetics would have to compete with a fully-developed legal market which can operate without the substantial costs of smuggling product into the country from inside desperate and impoverished people's asses. The legal market also has the substantial advertising advantage of, "Guaranteed by the FDA not to melt your face off!". Only a supreme idiot would buy black-market cosmetics, assuming the legal market retained at least its current diversity of products. There are probably a few such supreme idiots, but not enough.*

Don't believe me? Look at how regulated alcohol is, or tobacco is, and consider that the legal markets still rule. A significant argument for legal marijuana is, after all, to be able to regulate the product while shutting down the black market. If all regulation automatically resulting in the formation of a black market, this would be a silly argument. Given the recent experiences in Colorado and other states, it is not a silly argument at all.

*I expect a few supreme idiots, in such a world, would talk to each other on the Internet, concoct dangerous schemes involving amateur chemistry to produce cosmetics for their personal use, and proceed to melt their faces off. I expect this happens now, occasionally, anyway.

Sorry for replying twice, there was more stupid in your post that I didn't see until after replying to the first instance. "Doing the science is the right answer every time" is an absurd statement. The risks of experimentation must be balanced with the expected rewards. Or do you think we should resume testing hydrogen bombs by exploding them in random areas where we hope there aren't any people?

The Soviets exploded a giant bomb that created an earthquake in neighboring countries significant enough to cause effects such as shattering windows. I'm sure some people cut themselves on the glass. Was that really worth it to have another confirmation that splitting atoms makes things boom? No, and it was done more for political intimidation tactic than for science.

But I'm sure they had some scientists observe the boom from a safe distance. And I'm sure they, you know, got something out of it. Probably not much, but at least, "this bomb design is not so flawed that it won't at least sometimes go boom when activated". It was science. And it was science that should not have been done, because the earthquake alone was more disruptive than the marginal scientific gain.

Why do you think this is at all hypocritical? If there was useful stuff to be had from Dr. Mengele's research*, would you argue that we should not use it and let people suffer and die while we rediscovered it?**

In either case, the harm is done. If I were killed in a cruel scientific experiment by an amoral monster, I'd at least want the decent people in the human race to get everything they could out of my suffering. How is it less cruel to let a victim's death or suffering be entirely in vain, be that victim human or rabbit?

*According to the best sources I could find, there really wasn't.
**The most popular counterargument to using Dr. Mengele's research, besides that it just was too low-quality to be useful, is that it would encourage others to follow in his footsteps. I don't think this really applies to cruelty-free cosmetics.

Well, 100% backward incompatibility isn't always possible, but I think the gratuitous incompatibility in Python 3 is bad. Example: making print a function instead of a special statement. Yes, okay, maybe that would have made more sense 20 years ago when you designed the language. No disagreement, necessarily. But probably a million people or more are now used to typing "print whatever" into the Python interpreter during debugging and when making console Python applications, and inconveniencing all of those people because you think "print(whatever)" is more aesthetically pleasing is just plain inconsiderate.

My (mostly uninformed) opinion is they should have done whatever they needed to do to get Unicode working with minimal drama ... and then stopped there, at least as far as backward-incompatible changes go.

But, hey, they did it, and many people actually like what they did. Including, it looks like, the Django people. You might want to read this if you're curious what some big-name porters think of Python 3 (the attitude seems mostly positive).

That's not really fair. There are really only two versions: Python 2.7, which is mostly backward compatible earlier Python 2.x, and Python 3.x, which is a new, incompatible language similar in spirit to Python 2. The stated reason for radically breaking compatibility with Python 3 is "because Unicode". I don't much buy that, but whatever. Python 3 uptake has been slow because of the backward incompatibility, but it's clearly the future of the language. At the same time, Python 2.7 is still by no means a bad language, as long as you don't care about Unicode.

There's also Jython and IronPython, but those aren't official versions of the language.

How will it "collide"? They'll do what they can to assist with the decryption, which is nothing, and there will be no collision.

It grew quickly for a while because people actually cared about programming for Mac platforms after the iPhone became popular. It's stagnated now.

Strawman. I didn't say Swift was insignificant, just that it wasn't "THE BIGGEST NEW LANGUAGE IN A LONG TIME". It's not.

It's moderately significant if you want to program for fruity platforms, although you should probably use Obj-C. It is insignificant otherwise.

And it is a tweaked Obj-C. It takes Obj-C, cuts out pointers, and adds type inference. Yawn. The biggest thing it has going for it is library compatibility with Obj-C so fruity programmers can use Cocoa/Carbon.

Nice try. Not everyone uses their smartphone for web browsing: http://www.idc.com/prodserv/sm...

I don't know why you think a phone has to be "shitty" just because it costs less than a used car. Inexpensive!=shitty.

I never said C# was a well-done language, just that it was more significant than Swift. To me it looks like a slightly better done clone of Java. I generally prefer C++ for non-script programming.

And dismissing Mono because it lags behind the MS implementation isn't correct. That's not the point; Mono doesn't have to have 1-for-1 feature parity to be useful. Without Mono, C# would be isolated to Windows desktop/server development. Which is still a more significant area than writing 2D cartoon games for iOS, but still.

lol "THE BIGGEST COMPANY ON EARTH". I already told you that was a silly thing to say. Once again, market cap doesn't equal relevance for programmers. Or relevance for anyone or anything else except potential investors, really. Do you think the Apache web server is irrelevant because it's developed by a nonprofit foundation?

It doesn't matter that Swift is developed in the "mature Internet age", whatever you even mean by that. It doesn't matter that the official guide is an eBook. It does matter if it's truly an better than Objective C, because that's it's competition, and it does matter if Apple's programming community hates Objective C. I'd be surprised if they do because Objective C isn't a bad language, but whatever.

What does matter is what platforms you will be able to reach with Swift code. Right now that is Apple, and, umm, Apple. 11.7% of the global smartphone market (since you wanted a statistic so bad), less than that of the global desktop market. Microsoft's platform is much wider and richer, and even Microsoft decided it couldn't really get away with making C# a proprietary language, as evidenced by both its recent actions regarding open-sourcing the language and its earlier actions supporting Mono.

A good way to study the health of a language is to look at the third party community surrounding it. Like, "what will happen if the primary steward completely loses interest in the language and tries to kill it." Some languages, like C and C++, are so popular they transcend any one company, and the libraries and ecosystems for those are especially rich. For languages like Java, where the steward is a company rather than a committee, there are significant third-party projects in the area (like Eclipse, SWT, and bindings to GTK etc.), and that indicates good health. C# has Mono and ... not much else ... but Mono includes bindings to popular GUI libraries and stuff, so it's in fair health at least.

Python has a few third party implementations, but it's obviously tied pretty closely to its steward foundation. Fair-ish health to maybe fair health because the foundation is a community in itself. Objective C has ... umm ... a GCC frontend and GNUStep? Not really good health. The language used to be more widely used, but its non-Apple community has almost collapsed, and you can barely program in it in a cross-platform way anymore. Apple is the steward of Objective C, and few outside Apple are really dedicated to even keeping the language alive.

So where does Swift fit in? It's a spinoff of Objective C, which is in poor health, and, right now, no one outside of Apple is even saying they're going to do anything at all with it. It's not even going to be a flash in the pan like Ruby. It will be, at best, "the thing you use to make games for iPhones." Is it interesting if you want to make stuff for iPhones and maybe OS X? Yeah, sure, though, between Obj-C and Swift, I think it more wise to choose Obj-C since it at least has a weak and dying third party community attached to it.

Will its continued existence be entirely at the mercy of Apple? Just like Visual Basic 6 was completely at the mercy of Microsoft, and died when Microsoft decided to kill it?

Yup.

Given the replies to this post, apparently "I think the LSD has worn off now" wasn't an OBVIOUS ENOUGH SARCASM TAG.

So: SARCASM!

The uptake is unprecedented? Really? I imagine it will be approximately the same, or less, as the uptake for Obj-C when iPhones became a thing, which is "not terribly impressive". You're essentially forced to program in Obj-C for the iPhone, and it's still a niche language. People who write Mac-specific applications and iPhone apps use it, and essentially no one else.

And the thing is: Objective C could theoretically be used other places. The bindings are there for people to write an OSS GNUStep-based application that could run on any platform. But no one does.

And now you're telling me that Swift -- which is essentially a tweaked Obj-C -- is "the biggest new language in a long time"? You can't even USE the language to program on anything other than OS X and iOS! That limits its potential to exactly the same places Obj-C is used now. In its current form, it can never be more popular than Obj-C is now. And Obj-C just isn't that popular.

The only way Swift could become a language anyone not writing OS X or iOS-specific applications cares about is if it gets taken up by the OSS community and bindings are made so it can be used for normal cross-platform application development. Do you see that happening?

It could. Essentially GNUStep would be the key to that. But GNUStep has been around for well over a decade and has gotten essentially zero uptake.

I'm not seeing it, man. If a single popular smartphone and 10% desktop OS market share were enough for a language to piggyback off of to mainstream adoption, Objective C would be mainstream for cross-platform development. And it's not. It's "the language you use to write iPhone apps", and that's all it is. Swift borrows heavily from Obj C, and borrows the libraries wholesale. It will go the same way.

One last thing? Apple's only the "world's biggest company" because it overcharges for all its shit products, and stupid people don't see what a bad deal they're getting. In importance to the programming community, they're well below Google and Microsoft. Don't believe me? Take a look at C#'s popularity versus Obj-C.

If I wanted to learn a niche statically compiled programming language, I'd look at Rust or Go over Swift. My advice to the questioner would be to go learn Objective-C. At least you theoretically could use it for non-Apple-platform development if you really wanted to as the bindings to a few big-name C-family libraries like GTK are there. It's a tier-3 language in library support, for sure, but that's better than no support at all. Which is what Swift has right now and likely will for the foreseeable future.

Multithreading is hard, man. And it's not the only way to do parallelism, either. It also can hit all with, for instance, cache coherence traffic blocking access to RAM.

IMO multithreading might be a good model for handling multiple IO streams and really performance-sensitive apps.

Chrome and Firefox's Electrolysis actually use multiprocessing, not multithreading, for their parallelism. Multiprocessing is often a much better parallel computation model, and much more Unixy.

*Fellow Slackware user high-five!*

Although I've been with Slackware since long before the SystemD crap. Debian's been on a downward spiral ever since the hot-babe controversy, and probably before.

Even their logo is a downward spiral (okay that was a joke).

Right! Lord knows open source software is known for its hard dependencies on system-specific interfaces, and for its contempt for cross-platform standards such as POSIX.

I mean, if you're on Windows, you're totally SOL if you want to use anything from Linux-land. Likewise, Mac users are totally f*ed if they want to make use of their OS's Unix roots to run Linux-oriented software.

Oh, and BSD users who want to run anything outside the system core? Out of luck. No one's going to bother taking all that Linux-specific code, which never pays attention to POSIX and uses syscall() into the Linux kernel everywhere, for such a fringe distro!

I guess we'll just stay in the world we are now, where everything on SourceForge is hooked directly into the Linux kernel, and the de-jure standards like POSIX and de-facto ones like GLIB are used as toilet paper for the Linux devs' asses.

Everyone knows almost all OSS software only runs on Linux right now anyway. Now it'll just be more of the same, but with SystemD dependencies built in, too! ...

Hmm, I think the LSD has worn off now. Ok, I have another opinion:

OSS software tends to follow portability best practices, where hard dependencies are eschewed when possible. A few corrupt, blinkered projects such as GNOME might decide to build in hard dependencies to SystemD. Most other software won't, because they'd lose portability to every platform other than Linux with SystemD. And most OSS software cares about that.

HAND.

Geez man ... defensive much? Also, you write like a 10 year old. Might want to work on that.

India's HDI lags behind China, yes, but its growth rate has been matching China's as of late. Not sure what you mean by "superpower" ... both India and China have nukes and neither has enough to destroy the world, so ... yeah.

Well, considering each of those countries has less than a tenth of the population of China, I'm not sure why you'd expect their GDPs to match. A fairer comparison, I guess, would be China and the EU. You would call the EU a "superpower", I guess, right? Higher GDP? Probably more nuclear weapons?

And take another look at Japan. It's an almost uninhabitable collection of islands with half the GDP of China, a country with 10 times its population and probably 100 times or more habitable land.

And Taiwan, too. Yeah it's got 5% the GDP of China ... but it's a tiny island with a population 3 times the size of New York City. What more do you want, man?

That's offensive, unfairly stereotypes a class of people who are already disadvantaged, and also is not an argument. Good job.

That Western governments are not perfect does not mean China is isn't much, much worse. The no-fly list issue is working its way through the courts as we speak.

Well, Google's not. But, yes, human rights abuses are not generally relevant to foreign investment. I did say earlier that China hasn't been completely incompetent developing its economy.

I don't have a strong opinion on international investment in China either way. Certainly it's probably not a bad option to build a factory there or something in the short-to-medium term. Re financial investment, though, I've heard of pump-and-dump schemes on the China exchange, other crap, "joint ventures" with foreign corps where the foreign corp gets screwed over with industrial espionage ... the legal environment is iffy to say the least.

Businesses are actually moving to Vietnam and places for factories now because Chinese wages are getting too high.

I've been linuxrocks123 for over 12 years. I use it because it's technically excellent, not because of any of that. Not going to say OSS isn't relevant for security, but that's just gravy.