Maybe one reaosn PHP framworks come and go is how broken the underlieing language actually is and just how much a framework needs to do to compensate for that, leading almost to a new language that therefore needs a very big community to even survive.

For comparison of how simple a framework can be when the underlieing language is sane, just look at python flask. Not that i'm saying that's the solution to your particualr problem.

Hmm email server has to handle... emails, duh! Emails are untrusted data coming from untrusted sources, and your mail server is doing complex processing of those emails. So, yes, it is potentially remotely exploitable.

Sure, US states are big compared to european countries, some of them even in term of population (california, at 39 or so millions is comparable to a mid-sized european country). But the cultural diversity that you are talking about to me seems more comparable to the regional diversity within european countries such as italy, the UK or spain, which have mutually incomprehensible dialects/languages, completely different regional cuisines, and in some cases even some level of legal autonomy (spain, germany, UK) somewhat comparable to what US states enjoy.

This is fairly obvious to anyone who knows a little about both continents, but if you want a citation, how about this one: http://www.acco.be/download/nl/10987314/file/ (from 2008).

So by this measure, americans are 20 times more mobile inter-state than europeans are inter-country.

It's interesting that you mention the army. The policy in italy back when there was the draft was to send people to different parts of the country for military service, to help spread a common italian language and culture, because a lot of people never even traveled outside their region, let alone move there to live and work. That, together with national TV, is what has brought some level of linguistic and cultural unification to Italy in recent decades.

Sure, but this particular indiegogo campaign was fixed funding, so everyone is now getting their money back.

Sure, your converged phone won't replace a gaming rig for hardcore gamers, but not everyone games, and not everyone who does does so on the PC.

Who's talking about death of the desktop? Desktop is useful for some people. But again, not everyone games on the PC, strange as it may seem to you. With 16GB of ram on my laptop, I could easily do all my development work on my laptop, once attached to a bigger screen and keyboard.

Newsflash: laptops HAVE taken over desktops, in the sense that more laptops are sold than desktops, by about a factor 2 in 2012 http://www.inquisitr.com/76157/tablets-to-overtake-desktop-sales-by-2015-laptops-will-still-reign/, and that's excluding netbooks. Why? because performance is good enough for most people. Because the price differential is not quite as big as it used to be, and is worth it for many people in exchange for the portability. Tablets and netbooks are each also moving a comparable number of units to desktops. Again, they're good enough for many uses for many people.

Give it another couple iternations in performance, storage and battery improvements, and phones will be good enough for most people too, and will just need a bigger screen and keyboard to be usable for running most desktop applications, except for high-GPU users like games, photoshop, etc.

If you type zeitgeist or privacy in the unity dash, you get a nice little privacy configuration widget where you can delete past history, set it to not record history for some specific programs or about files in specific folders, or even disable zeitgeist completely. Wonder how well windows XP, let alone it's successors, fare in allowing to disable this kind of stuff.

Just tried this: typing "mail" in the unity dash brings up thunderbird as first option. Just like typing "video" brings up movie player as first option. I'm not sure exactly how this works, but the search is not based exclusively on the application title, and generally seems pretty successful at bringing up what I am looking for when I make a fairly generic search.

This argument is very weak. The cultural differences between US states exist, but they are NOTHING compared to the cultural differences between european states. Why? because these states don't have centuries of independent histories and different languages and literatures and tradition. Also, because absent the language barrier and the visa barrier that was present even within europe up to a few years ago, Americans are very mobile: they move from one state to another to study, work, marry, etc. Which is a very good thing for the economy BTW. So the cultural differences that existed 150 years ago have been declining ever since the interstate highway system was built or even before. People of different US states are much too mixed to really have different cultures.

And finally let me get back to language. i cannot overemphasize just how important languages are from a cultural stand-point. Are you fluent in two or more languages? If the answer is no, I'm sorry, but you are unable to understand what cultural difference actually means.

I really don't see why you can't have both. Even just a shell dialect of python with no semantic leading space and braces would largely solve the issue and make python a better bash in addition to what it already is.

A big advantage of python-as-a-shell is that it can direclty import and invoke all the available libraries and all of our python code (javascript?! it doesn't even have a decent date library, let alone math!). And with ipython plus python's native reflection and documentation support, you can do some pretty cool things. For instance we had a SOAP api where the pydoc documentation of methods on the server was automatically provided via auto-completion and ? operator in an ipython client. If you added a method on the server, it would magically appear as a method on the object on the client.

Care to point out some highlights? A little bit of evangelism would not hurt. If you ask Stroustroup what are the cool new features of C++11, he has a good answer ready. Other than the new unicode support, which is very important in some contexts but not everywhere, I see nothing else that's very exciting looking here: http://docs.python.org/3.0/whatsnew/3.0.html.

Much as I love python, I see nothing to refute my objections to python's use of semantic spaces and lack of braces or other equivalent construct.

- It makes python ineffective as a shell-replacement language, because you can't easily do a complex one-liner and then retrieve it from history
- It makes cutting and pasting code difficult, which makes refactoring unnecessarily painful
- It makes it impossible to fully auto-format code: all formatters I have seen for python do not trust themselves to touch leading spaces, nor should they. This leads to ugly, inconsistent-looking code.

It's not just about the obvious problem of tripping up anyone who is not paying attention to this peculiarity of the language. If python had semantic line ends (but not semantic leading spaces) with optional semi-colons (for when you don't use a line end) plus braces, the amount of extra typing and visual clutter would be minimal, while these problems would go away, making python a more useful language.

Tools like ipython and fabric go a long way into making python into something that can replace my bash shell in many situations.

The main obstacle to this use-case is python's semantic spacing and lack of braces (or something):

- it is hard to do even a fairly simple if/else or loop in a single line so it will interact nicely with the terminal's history
- it is hard to cut&paste code into the terminal because you have to be wary of leading spaces

Ipython tries to solve some of this with shortcuts to bring up a built-in editor, which is an approach that works but is quite cumbersome.

Do you think convenient usage on the interactive shell is a worthy goal that the language should support? if so, is there any direction the language or libraries could develop to better support it?

What are the big features/improvements of python 3 that could/should convince me to make the effort to switch over from python 2.x to python 3.x?

I am not able to do the switch now as I rely on some libraries that have not finished converting to python 3 yet, but having something to look forward to other than the pain of backwards-incompatibility could go a long way in getting me to prepare for the change instead of ignoring the issue.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-19/

Indeed, Godwin's law by any other name still smells as sweet...