Well, I'm a Finn, so we count as a "Socialist medicine" country, and as a somewhat severely disabled person by birth who still has been patched up to be a happy taxpayer, I certainly count as a huge and probably never fully profitable beneficiary of our system, but anyway...

I frankly do not believe in the "UHC people do not care about the cost to benefit" argument. At least in civilized countries, people will have some common sense that even when they might totally destroy their health, it's not going to be fun even though they might get healthcare in the end. You'll want to avoid getting an organ transplant in general even though it might be paid for. When there are obvious public health concerns, such as the generally excessive alcohol intake in Finland, educating the public is a relatively small "totalitarian" cost as the objective benefit is so easy to see. Pure Libertarians will of course always disagree, and I can appreciate that.

The benefit of general social insurance not only in economic but ethical terms just outweighs any abuse concerns. Those who would, really deserve the pain that comes with the unfortunately necessary pain that comes with the condition they put themselves into, regardless of the healthcare they're getting.

And when it comes to actually *how* to provide the healthcare, it's all actually mercifully objective -- it's not like buying a car. Medicine is a science. We know that certain treatments work, in a scientific sense, and others do not. Hospitals do not need to be hotels. During my lifetime, I've been treated by incredibly skilled and compassionate public-sector doctors and nurses who have done their best -- and yet I've always been glad to be out of the hospital, as that means I'm getting better. And the outcome has been pretty good so far, yet I'm not so sure after all the cuts that are being imposed at the moment. Even the public sector can't run on thin air :-)

Mind you, nothing actually could describe Fenno-Swedes better, either. We must be assimilated into "Norden", and if we don't agree, we violate their human rights.

LoOoOoOooOoooOooooOOOooL

Yeah, but how many people with the actual surname "Suomi" do you know anyway... :-)

As a Finn, I'm glad to have "Finland" (in Finnish) up there in orbit :-)

Well, programming language design and compiler theory and so on are a subfield of CS, but otherwise I'm in agreement. Personally I've learned a lot from the more academic languages such as Lisp and Haskell although I don't really use them in my day to day job.

How awesome that Swedish civilization is finally reaching Slashdot too. Here in Finland we've been at the receiving and of you for a long time and it's just getting "better" all the time. Nowadays the required dogma is that we're a bunch of barbarians if we don't take it in deep when as young as possible while we're still soft and malleable so that we don't develop "attitude problems" by getting this idea that we might actually have a "right" not to suck it and love it.

But anyway, glad to see you're bringing the gift of your awesomeness to here as well. Too bad I'm sure you'll be oppressed by being modded down, but don't be discouraged; by finding other minority-rights minded people, I am sure you will be able to demand a change in Slashdot's policies so that everyone will have to actually read you, and perhaps in the future, also have the right to produce exactly the same kind of material, so that they will not be oppressed by the future equal-rights rules of actually having to post exactly like you!

Well, code readability and maintainability often mean a good design, which means that the problem is understood correctly and that the program can be seen to be correct. These are very good qualities in a language if it helps in achieving this.

Productivity is just a side-effect of a good language; for me this issue is more philosophical than that. The actual conceptual features of higher-level languages outright produce better thinking about issues...

I'm not sure I understand how this is relevant; what I was saying is intended to be abstract. All languages once in a certain class (which, according ot that one guy in some other post, I am not allowed to mention so that I don't sound arrogant) are equivalent, so at least going down to asm does not give us any more theoretical power. Therefore, we're free to choose a representation, and my position says that for the human mind, asm is a remarkably bad representation for a symbolic expression in that class of languages, and coding in it does not produce as much insight about programming in general as some people try to claim. I am a bit of a believer in the Sapir-Worf hypothesis as far as programming languages go -- programming languages shape thinking processes about problems. And I never have had a symbolic thinking process about a problem that represents asm a bit.

As far as I agree with it -- I sort of do, but it's not a Turing-completeness issue -- it seems like my preference for higher-level languages would indeed manage complexity in non-trivial software better, no?

Well, that exercise is outright designed to find the fair value of his life... I suspect that to both of us, the value is actually quite high indeed, and we'd come to an agreement about that.

Yes, when I first was learning, pointers were a somewhat hard concept. I'm not sure you need assembly for that though; some basic education on computer architecture should suffice, and the rest really, semantically speaking, is a matter of having "indirection variables"... variables that know where to find some other value.