You probably never had to code couple thousand lines of code in a day, have you?

Perl5 is otherwise fine language. I'm using it now for more than 15 years, including using it 2 years full-time professionally.

In the past, on smaller things, Perl's syntax was not as cumbersome. But for newer code, especially OO one, the denser code is just overflowing with the sigils (and dereferences). In the older times, for small/medium stuff, one often resorted to the built-in variables. In OO code, literally everything is a user variable, and a reference more often then not. Sigils and the -> are the most typed characters and are the most annoying ones, since they are hard to type by touch. Modern Perl5 iteration lessen the burden by allowing to skip the -> in more cases than before. But the sigils have remained untouched.

Using references for this?... Perl6 is crazier than I thought.

In the past, I could work it around using the Win32::OLE (with CP_UTF8) and the host scripting interfaces.

But if I recall correctly, with Strawberry Perl, in couple of cases, I had no problems with the unicode file names.

Over the years of using Perl5 I have realized its greatest shortcoming: I have to type $/%/@ characters too often, what sometimes gets me - especially if I try to do something OO in Perl.

I have looked (again) at Perl6 recently, and was appalled to see that it used even more of punctuation than the Perl5.

As a way forward for Perl5, a special mode which allows to omit the $/%/@ qualifiers would be really nice. After all, Perl already has the "bareword" error handling: it shouldn't be too hard to make the qualifier optional.

Some scientists bear a lot in common with religious people. Few psychologists and philosophers claim that we, humans, naturally predispositioned to have blind believes, aka religion.

Or let me put it in a different perspective. Some scientists believe that laws of physics control the world - while others know that laws of physics are just loose model describing our knowledge about the world around us.

And that's what we call "herd mentality". And how it is enforced: with the fear of social exclusion.

That's just nonsense.

The "you should have consent of all people in your picture" is a new prevailing legal paradigm how to deal with paparazzi and such. Otherwise, the person in a photograph simply has no rights whatsoever: authorship belongs to the photog, the copyright to the organizer/etc, while bystanders have no place in the copyright scheme whatsoever.

Germany and most Europe has extended it to public places mostly because the most visited public places - the sightseeing hotspots in the Europe - are also the places where local people live and work. And they lived and worked there long before the shitty tourist epidemic.

First. It's not only the Germany. Lots of countries - and some states in the USA - have similar laws.

Second, the need for consent in Germany has nothing to do with the law. It is just the local tradition to ask permission if person(s) feature in your photograph prominently. It was like that even before the laws made it official.

Otherwise, in a public place one generally does not need a consent. But if somebody sees that you making pictures of them, with the help of the law, they have legal standing to request the deletion of the unwanted images. And that's normal: people on the street are not pro models, why should you be able to profit of their images, if they do not want it?

You comment doesn't make sense. First you say "ads are needed!" but then you go and say "unless" and list all the reasons why people install the adblockers in the first place.

That thing people call "acceptable ads" is as old as the internet advertisement itself. It didn't work 20 years ago - I do not see reasons why it would work today. Greed always wins and all "acceptable ad" networks, however good their intentions initially are, turn to shit sooner or later. Or die, because the toxic competition always outbids them.

Few things gov't could stop doing: R&D tax breaks and science education in the public schools.

These two easily dwarf the rest of the gov't science-related expenditures.

I wonder what the experts would have to say to that.

The Linus' comment is somewhat outdated.

For the first type of collision - the inadvertent kind - a check was added to the git very long time ago. It will not let you commit, if there is a hash collision. The time-stamp is also part of the commit, and as such, the workaround is to simply wait one second and try to commit again.

But that is true for all modern developers and all modern platforms.

IMO blaming developers is useless.

Or think of it in terms of the desktop software development: one does not have to bundle megabytes of libraries and frameworks with you desktop application, because they are already preinstalled by the OS.

Web? The mindless application of the "because security" argument made it impossible to even bundle something like jQuery with the browser. All sites use their own (often identical) versions and fetch them every damn time anew. Even in case of desktop browsing, this is shitty practice. Alas, "because security", browser makers decided to completely remove the responsibility from themselves.

They promote Web as a platform, but the sad reality is that making web-sites without the 3rd party libraries often reminds me of my younger days, coding in assembler: yes, you can do anything and everything efficiently and beautiful, it just takes so much time that it is simply not viable for any commercial development.

But I know, I know, "because security" nothing can be really improved or changed. "Because security".

P.S. The most profoundly ironic moment is the origin of the cross-site scripting vulnerabilities: they do exists largely because of the advertisement. Very few sites actually need multiple domains and would do fine in a sandboxed environment. If not for the web ads, the web security would have been a truly minor problem, paving the way for the much needed "web as a platform" changes.

They are not. VW lied about the EURO6 compliance. The court cases are popping up all over the Europe.

IIRC, as a rule of thumb, California emission standards follow pretty closely the European ones. If VW is prosecuted in CA, then it is likely to be prosecuted in EU too.

Also, "keep in mind" most of those 10M cars were sold in EU. US market for diesel cars is relatively small.

... and the loop is closed.

Though on global scale, IME, another problem is that the former is relatively well accepted, but the later should be never mentioned to the customer. Or to your sales. Or to your PM. Or to your colleagues.

Most people need the certainty about the results. Because result is something concrete, while the process is something distant. Because most people spend to little time understanding the whole development process and their role in it.

P.S.

Not all customers are OK with that. For business-critical software, installing new (even minor) release and testing could be in itself medium/major project. For example, if deployment of a new release could take a month, it doesn't make sense to have a monthly release schedule. Some customers also see the too many point releases as an attempt to shift the review and/or testing burden onto them. (And I have seen that abused in real life. En lie with submarine major architectural changes in minor releases, and later demanding money from the customer to rollback, because, duh, you should have caught earlier that the architecture was changing not the way you liked it! you have all the 123 point releases which show the whole transition in fine detail!)

The problem with the statement is that it misses HUGE number of over-expensive optimizations which can't be done at run-time because, duh, they are slow and very resource-consuming.

Which is why Java's HotSpot might produce fast code - but the code typically is times larger than what normal compiler would do. (Consider a simple example: It is easy to unroll the loop - but optimizing the resulting code duplication to improve the i/d-cache usage is a no-go at run-time.) The consequence is that HotSpot has to be limited in how much memory can be dedicated to the generated code, meaning that only small fraction of the code is actually optimized, and optimized only using the methods which can be actually performed in real-time.

The myth of the "good" Java performance is perpetuated mostly because the Java these days is stuck in the server-side niche (fat niche - but still a niche) where it has literally no competition, and nothing to be compared to.

That's a load of blatant BS.

First, Java standard library is full of slow retarded crap (consider the dead horse example of the String.split()).

Second, unlike Java, C/C++ are used heavily in the HPC (High Performance Computing) and there are people whose full-time job is nothing but optimizing the code, optimizing the compilers and optimizing the libraries. And some of the people are actually employed by Intel/AMD/HP/etc, the companies which actually produce the hardware and the compilers and the libraries. The vertical integration doesn't get more vertical as in this case.

Two things I use the most on Windows and which are missing on Linux:

A media player similar to MPC-HC. (VLC's UI is kind of crap. Nowadays - animated crap. Always was and it seems that they are not going to ever fix it. Still no click to play/pause. And some keyboard shortcuts are missing too. And the video tearing is also much worse on Linux than on Windows.)

A tool similar to AutoHotKey. There are efforts to replicate the tool on the Linux, but they are all castrated because of security and missing features and whatnot.

But in reality, though the state of the video players on Linux is as frustrating as it ever was, there is really nothing I'm missing too much.