Problem is that skeptical scientists such as Richard Lindzen agree with that 'consensus', because the question is too narrow. Ask something more interesting like, "should we replace all our coal power with renewables because to prevent AGW?" or "is AGW going to be catastrophic?" and you will find that there is no consensus.

And should such consensus emerge, you can always rephrase the question again. Or maybe you'll claim the answer should be ignored since climatologists are not, after all, engineers. Perhaps you'll come up with something more creative. Just as long as it lets you dismiss science that's saying things you don't want to hear while pretending to be scientific.

Climate change scepticism certainly serves as a wonderful demonstration about human capacity for self-deception.

What kind of a better replacement that clerics involved in rotating those numbers en masse on continous basis are you suggesting?

A proper double-entry bookkeeping system, with every location an account. Why hack together a solution when the problem was solved centuries ago?

The whole concept of "revenge porn," insofar as it applies to nudes and porn freely made and disseminated, is ever so much "I want my freedom.... but I don't want my choices to have consequences of which I don't approve."

Does this only apply to revenge porn, or would you also blame someone who gets mugged for being out after dark?

We have a term for that behavior. It's called behaving like a child.

No, that's just you attempting to use rhetoric to dismiss a position without actually analysing it.

Yes, well, the terminal was a much more sensible sane client that could take care of itself. We should _definitely_ go back to that on-the-line paradigm.

These are such tiny little warts. A) don't use global variables, perhaps 'use strict' if you want to be good. B) most languages have arbitrary bit limits. Holding up the floating point limit of 52 bits and making mock of that, but not holding up the 64-bit limit of integers? That's weak sauce accusations from sore fucking whiney babies. Oh you want to insist on arbitrarily deep numerical precision? Have fun crossing off a huge section of people that need moderately performant math.

Languages are all basically the same shit, with slight flourishes that everyone gets zealous and overblown about. Get serious. Go find something real to fight about, like how vim is so much better than emacs.

Yes, but the proliferation of tools makes it harder to make sensible decisions about which one's are directly applicable. Copy pasting random stack overflow answers in and hoping they work is a regular practice, and it's the very embodiment of what's happened in the technical realms: information glut.

Worse: a lot of information, very little sense. Very few projects out there bother spending the time to trace their genetic roots, to find historical context where sense-making of information can even begin.

I don't want to agree or disagree about web or web apps being kludgetastic or not, but I do want to point out- there were a lot less people doing programming and they'd built themselves a lot less tooling. What had to be understood was far less, and what it could be done was yet far less still.

A diverse technical ecosystem springing up is, in my view, a healthy thing: a natural awakening and striving for new potentials. That the many technical societies and practices don't all form themselves towards the same careful deliberate ends, one free of subcultures and instead pushing towards one unified culture, is natural.

This claim of elegant understandable tools of old is more likely to be the unavailability of other signals out there cluttering up the programming spectrum. Thrown into the mess of programming, it's hard to discern relevance of the many things one is being exposed to.

-LM

Just because most of the people graduating with a degree in physics never actually use quantum physics in their jobs does not mean it's pointless to teach quantum physics to students.

Actually, it does. That's exactly what it means. If your "degree in X" doesn't mean you'll be using Y in your work, it's pointless to include Y in said degree, as long as said degree is mainly a qualification for work.

I'm not sure than any language exists that can truly* replace GOTO through the use of other flow control sugars.

Haskell. Pure functions combined with monads are pretty awesome concepts once you really grasp them.

While I do think that it is of extreme value to know what problems something (in this case, a paradigm) tries to solve, I do not think that you need to know procedural programming to know object oriented programming.

The problem with procedural programming is that every piece of code can touch every piece of data. The problem is combinatory explosion. If you've never run into that problem, how can you understand the need for a solution?

It might, in most cases, also be beneficial to most people. But as I saw my college classmates go through this (we did procedural Python, then C, then Java), I noticed that many of them had quite a lot of trouble getting rid of the "procedural way" of doing things, and often made more errors than I did when I first learned OOP. Maybe I'm an exception. But, oh well...

I've never been to college, so I wouldn't know. But this is how it worked for me: line-number Basic, C, Object-oriented, functional. I don't know any of these well, but I know what problem each rose to solve - except functional, since it didn't rise to solve problems in programming, but is simply an alternative way of describing algorithms. However, I'm developing a love/hate relationship with Haskell.

I'll disagree on that. We use white space to communicate our programs' block structure to other humans. Why should we use a different syntax to tell the compiler the same information?

Because our visual cortext deals with geometric structure, while the compiler deals with logical structure. It's simply more efficient to tell the compiler the latter, and let the IDE to format the code for easy consumption by the former.

Computers should conform to the needs of humans. Full. Stop.

I agree. And in my experience, it's much easier to have explicit block start/end markers and let the IDE format things than wonder if your bugs are caused by mixed tabs and spaces.

Python eliminates that source of bugs and redundancy by having the compiler's view of the significance of what space match a human's view of significance of white space.

No, it doesn't, and that's precisely the problem. My eye can't tell the difference between 8 spaces and a tab, but the compiler can. And I often find myself refactoring the code in ways that causes space-based alignment to get inconsistent. In languages like Java I just insert braces and tell the compiler to reformat, and all is well; in languages like Python, I'll have a fun time re-indenting hundreds of lines and hoping I get everything right.

"Indentation is logical structure" sounds like a good idea, but it's not. It's a horrible one.

Some of us like having the training wheels off our bikes.

The problem is, if you're doing commercial development, you're not driving your bike, you're driving a company-owner truck.

C is very beginner friendly in my opinion. It was my first non-BASIC language. Learning C you learn how those bits and bytes work and how shit gets done. The paradigm is old but not obsolete.

C is not beginner friendly. The reason is that it's not a managed language, so a mistake will have unpredictable consequences, rather than firing an exception like in Java. Yes, you can still do it; I learned C by reverse engineering Nethack sources in pre-Internet days and debugging all errors with printfs ("got here!") and logic, and perhaps that should be the criteria for serious programmers, but that's hardly "beginner friendly".

Personally, I think programmers should start with with line-number Basic, then move to procedural programming, then to object-oriented. You can't really understand a paradigm unless you know the problem it was designed as a response for.

That's not the correct use of the word "coercion", and it's a misuse that indicates a bias regarding economic policy. Coercion indicates the use of force or threat of force by one against another. A person in the wilderness must work or die, and no other person is there to coerce him to work.

You do realize that the entire point of civilization is to make things different from being alone in the wilderness, right? So if they aren't, then the civilization has failed miserably. Also, the conditions in wilderness are not under anyone's control, while the conditions in civilization are.

And I absolutely have a "bias" regarding economic policty: I believe economy exists to serve human needs and as such must address not just efficiency, but also fairness and security. Our current economy fails with all three.

Boy did you miss the point. The point is that I COULD. That is hugely different than simply taking what someone else said as the final word without questioning. What makes processes like science or open source software so powerful is not that I have to check everything myself to trust it. What makes them powerful is that I always have the opportunity to check for myself. If you cannot see the difference then there is not much I can help you with here.

Religions are based on nothing of the sort. Most religions are a philosophical interpretations of collection of fables detailing things that cannot be proven to reassure and generally to gain power over those who are insecure and afraid. All that nonsense about the "right way to live" is simply trying to put a digestible coating on a pile of unprovable nonsense. Telling people "god said to do it" is much easier to explain than actually making a rational argument about why killing other people is a bad idea.

Really? Prove to me that Jesus actually rose from the dead. Prove to me that there was a garden of Eden. Prove to me that Jesus or Mohammed actually said any of the things they are reputed to have said. Prove to me that there is a diety of any sort. The bible, the koran, etc upon which the major religions are based are based on nothing testable at all. They are stories told to prey upon vulnerable people's insecurities so that others may gain influence and power. Organized religion gives "answers" that cannot possibly be true or proven or known.

So because you are inadequate to the task of understanding quantum mechanics it becomes faith? Perhaps you feel the need to drag things you don't understand down to your level so you don't feel so bad about yourself. The observations are there to be made and whether you understand them or not is irrelevant to their existence. You not understanding doesn't make it faith. It simply means you don't know and there is no shame in admitting that.

You know nothing of my background so you can keep your insults to yourself. I've plenty of background in both - enough that I find your assertion rather bemusing.

I have no patience for those who blindly follow religious dogma out of insecurity and then try to drag rational discourse down to the same level. If you want to believe in absurd things you have no basis for then by all means have at it. But don't expect me to follow along or condone your lunacy for even a moment.