On the flip side though, there are people who are victims of domestic abuse, are relocated witnesses, wish to make comment from within an oppressive regime, have been high profile victims of crime, or are just 'ordinary' famous. They also want to use the internet, and have good reasons not to want to 'go public'.

Slightly different beasts I think. R is a really impressive analysis tool. Python is a scripting language. The latter is quite a bit more versatile, but ... probably isn't the right tool to solve the problem outlined in the OP.

Well, you can. You get to vote. Or move to another country. Or declare independence. I understand that's worked out well occasionally.

There's always always a balance. The police have powers to investigate the innocent. They're innocent because they're - legally - innocent until _proven_ guilty. Which means - by definition - the police are always targeting 'the innocent'. There's a bunch of rules to limit this, including not least a system of warrants - to do certain things to people, you need to be able to convince a judge that they're sufficiently dirty to be worth further investigation. But they're still - in the literal sense - still innocent at that point, because you haven't proven their crime in a court of law.

It's not a perfect system by any means, but it mostly works - _generally_ the bad people get caught and punished, and the good people are protected. But sometimes there are abuses, and part of the point of any system of justices is that it has to accept the inevitable - that sometimes you'll get it wrong.

But it's generally accepted to be one of the least bad options.

Loads of people die in hospitals. Who knew? Dangerous places those hospitals.

If only you had healthcare free at the point of need.

World's biggest game of tetris....

Most tyres mix units. I have 220/50/R17 on mine - width in mm, depth in percentage ratio, and wheel radius in inches. This might seem utterly daft, until you realise that it makes dimension transposition quite difficult - you'll (almost!) always be able to sort the units into numeric order and get consistent results.

Q: How do you know you're tallking to a mensa member?
A: They'll have already told you.

If you're doing 2000 liners, Perl also lets you do things like object oriented code, modularisation etc. It may not be the best tool at that job, but it's a pretty versatile one that scales quite well.

And you still get bad code. How about we stop blaming a language for what's clearly a wetware problem?

You can write bad code in any language. Perl is just more tolerant. That's a feature. It means you have more scope for writing _good_ code, with decently formatting, structure and idioms.

You don't have to do that of course, and you can continue playing with obfuscated code. But really - that's not the fault of the language you're using.

I don't agree. C is great for hooking syscalls into the OS and does work extremely fast... however it's also incredibly unfriendly for the tasks that most people need to do. I'd start with something higher level, and drop down to C if you really need to squeeze the last little bit of performance out.

I think Perl gets a bad reputation for letting people get away with 'ugly' code. I'd counter argue that writing bad code is possible in any language - part of what a developer should be doing is writing _good_ code, and Perl gives the tools you need to allow that. (and the 'ugly' code still generally works, which is good enough if you just need a 2 line one off). I still use it today, because I was starting to outgrow baseline shell scripting - back when you didn't have 'bash' available, on everything, and were stuck with ksh or sh. If one had to install an 'extra' then why not be Perl. It still has a very wide base of support - I'm rarely stuck for finding an interpreter to run code. (Although I do sometimes end up with some quite old perl versions). It has a lot of extra code available from CPAN, and it will support everything from a very simple shell script program, all the way to object oriented multithreaded code. Perhaps not the _best_ tool for a specific task, but a versatile one that's pretty good at anything. If I really need to eke out a fine slice of performance, it's time to whip out the C or machine code. For everything else, algorithms matter way more, and so Perl is plenty.

I disagree. Humans are fundamentally self centered, selfish and tribal. Not all of them, but enough that we have many examples in history of ... really unpleasant things happening. Some are decent folk, but these are not the ones ruthless enough to rise to the top. This is why you need a code of laws to establish baselines of acceptable behavior, and a collective system for rejecting the worst examples. This applies as much to employment law as criminal law.