Not actually true. Ultra-orthodox Jews do not (yet) have to serve in the army.

<sarcasm>After all, the ultra-orthodox never provoke any trouble with the Palestinians, so why should they contribute to defence?</sarcasm>

Speaking as someone who's been following this story as it developed, it seems to me that the data that has been 'lost' is data the high heid yins of Scotland's police were very eager to lose. They'd been acting beyond their remit - and probably beyond the law - and they knew it.

So I suspect someone with scrambled egg on their hat took that programmer into a quiet room and said 'you will make an unfortunate error this afternoon, or we'll be sending the boys round'. I'm pretty sure the government suspect the same.

Heads will, I suspect, roll - and I don't think they will be the heads of programmers.

I can't say five good things about Windows, and I've worked on every version since Windows 2.0.

Dammit, I don't think I can say one good thing about Windows.

Those of us who actually worked on NeXT will never touch MacOS X with a barge pole. I still have nightmares about that steaming pile of shit.

It was 1993 for me. And I moved to Linux from, guess what, BSD. I've never gone back and I don't plan to.

Yes, I really have been using Linux as my main operating system for more than twenty years, and I still haven't found anything better. And Linux, in 1993, was just a reimplementation of UNIX, which is forty years old. Software evolves so bloody slowly!

Yep, that's the only option. There's nothing between doing nothing and that option. It's all we have. And if anyone starts to talk about mitigation strategies, planning ahead of time or devoting a single cent of taxpayer money toward preparing for it, we are just all going to have a meltdown and throw a tantrum with teabags on our hats. Thank god we have these strawman arguments for what these ivory tower Oxford elitists are telling us to do: eliminate the human race to protect the human race. I cannot believe they would actually come to that conclusion but there it is, right in the article. Those environmentalists will have us starving in mud huts by the end of the month if we just sit by and let this academic report go unabated and without criticism!

*tortured sigh*

> I'm guessing that's how most kids on the minor end of the spectrum feel

I'm guessing that's how most kids feel...

> A moderate amount of time to himself is fine... it seems to "recharge his batteries" for more social interactions

Isn't that the definition of "introvert"?

Scheme doesn't have unreadable syntax; that's a category error. Scheme does not have syntax. That's the difference. What you're editing is the raw parse tree; and that's a significant part of what makes Scheme (and other homoiconic languages) so powerful.

From the article:

From that they got 100 million lines of Java code and tossed out simple methods (those with less than 50 tokens).

Good coding style is to decompose your problem thoroughly, so your methods will be very small. Indeed, using this methodology, the more you refactor the greater proportion of so called 'chaff' you'll get.

I'm not arguing with the general propositions that

• Java is an extraordinarily prolix language, and
• These days, most Java is exceedingly poorly written

But this study doesn't show it, because it arbitrarily tossed away the better-written code and then analysed the remainder.

My experience is that freelancers - at least those with a good few projects under their belt - tend to have higher coding standards in the first place, and are more adaptable to different coding standards than permanent staff. Good freelancers are used to, and skilled at, learning and adapting to new stuff.

Tail Call Optimisation is not implemented in Clojure, and the reason given in the documentation is precisely that interoperability with Java prevents this. Instead there's a recur special form, which, in my opinion, is a bit of an ugly hack.

(apply str (take 7 (range)))

This is kind of nonsense.

In most current compilers for ALGOL derived imperative programming languages (such as C, Java, C#, Pascal...), it's true, because, TRADITION! But it's not true of the underlying hardware, and it's not true of any compiler which implements its stack as a linked list. In principle there is no reason at all why you should not allocate all your available store to stack. There's also no reason why you cannot dynamically implement your stack in your heap.

These are all language (and run-time) design choices, and just because the people who specified ALGOL in 1958 - when I was three, goddammit - were working on machines which were (by modern standards) desperately poor of both mill and store, doesn't mean that we need to continue to copy the design choices they made then.