For example I've heard that the Canadian tar sands oil production requires a minimum price of around $85/barrel to be viable. If we start digging up oil shale it's got to be a lot more than that.

It's worse than that: more exotic sources of crude oil require more energy to extract—potentially more energy than is available in the oil itself! Because energy density is high from crude oil, it may make sense to "waste" energy in extraction because the result is useful as a transportation fuel, and also to stabilize relative prices between energy sources (e.g. spending cheap natural gas to produce expensive crude). But it still means that some energy extraction is a net loss, which is a very bad starting point.

If Walmart wants to buy bread from BreadCo, what are they going to pay for it with? Walmart gift cards? ... This isn't a recipe for a stable economy, it's a mess.

I'm not sure what your point is with all of this. Your argument seems to be "if the US government disappears overnight, things fall apart." But that's not very constructive, because it's based on an extremely thin premise: immediate devaluation of USD to 0; no massive worldwide selloff, just *poof* it's gone. Furthermore, you don't seem to be able to see past the initial messy period. Sure, there will be a large barter economy. But that's not new, people have survived with barter economies in the past! So, something will appear to fill the USD void, and stability will slowly return. Because if it didn't, then we wouldn't be talking about this today. We would be trading goats and ball bearings, and murdering 70-year-old men in suits.

You think some 70-year-old suit is going to be able to maintain control?

If he murders people left and right and scares the fuck out of everyone else, then yeah I would stay off of his lawn.

Well I do have to admit that when I took my Mac into the shop the guy at the Genius Bar didn't even blink when I told him it was running Linux. So none of this "you are running the wrong software" shenanigans there.

As a counter-example, I had "you are running the wrong wireless access point" problems from the Genius bar. My wife was seeing occasional DNS resolution failures and generally slow web browsing, which turned out to be packet loss between the laptop and the access point. At least two techs immediately argued that the problem must be the access point, and that we should replace it with an AirPort. It took four tries (phone calls and in-person) to find someone who would honor ping statistics from a variety of wireless devices.

I'm not saying Javascript is superior or inferior to C.

I'm not trying to argue that any language is better, either. I originally responded to this:

Name one other language that is as well supported and as broadly implemented as JavaScript?

and your subsequent reply moved the goalposts by arguing about deployment effort. Yes, you're right, C software requires more work to deploy to N platforms, but that is irrelevant to the presence of broad multi-platform support. I'm really not trying to say that C is better than Javascript. But surely it has a larger footprint across platforms!

I think it's safe to say that you prefer C to the exclusion of everything else.

Actually, no. I can read C fine, but I don't code fluently in it. I usually switch between C++, Python, and bash depending on the task.

If you need to sort other things like complex objects in an array

Oh god help us all, complex objects like integers?

It hasn't even been able to replace Perl

Python has definitely replaced Perl where I work. It's also very quickly catching up to R (statistical/quantitative analysis), but from what I hear there is still a network effect keeping R on top for bleeding-edge research.

and you must compile for every platform.

Yes, deployment requires compilation once per target. How many platforms exist which have a javascript interpreter but no C compiler? I believe my point stands.

Since nobody has offered any other languages to your challenge, I'll suggest Lua as a trivial alternative: the core language is implemented in ANSI C, so it is likely that Lua is portable to any platform that supports C. However, the core functionality of Lua is ridiculously hamstrung (ANSI C doesn't support sockets, for example) so the language is not well-suited for general-purpose programming.

C is ubiquitous.

Except on platforms that ban third-party native applications.

Even if the walled gardens don't permit software implemented in C, it is extremely likely that some part of the walled garden's own software stack is still written in C—because C is ubiquitous.

Name one other language that is as well supported and as broadly implemented as JavaScript?

C is ubiquitous.

Many fighting games feature reaction windows no more than 5 ms wide, and some have windows ~1 ms wide. And players can hit them.

I've heard of fighting games (e.g. Street Fighter) with 1 frame windows, but the games were 60 fps ~ 16.67ms. That is more in line with your figures from John Carmack's experimentation. Your 1ms figure does not sound credible, can you provide a reference?

The PEP you quoted only applies to packages within the standard library. It also spends a few paragraphs warning against overzealous whitespace "harmonization". Even though a link to that PEP is extremely useful in this thread, please tone down the arrogance.

He made the case [why one should never use Python] very convincingly.

How so? It sounds like you and the AC are just looking for an excuse to whine. Let me explain again: I maintain a non-Python codebase with horrendous whitespace, and a Python codebase with consistent whitespace. The non-Python codebase is full of maintenance developers shitting on each other's indentation, and it makes future maintenance more expensive.

[whitespace] can't be discerned thoroughly via ordinary tools used in the ordinary way like cat,

How frequently do you look at code with cat, that invisible whitespace errors are a problem? It doesn't even paginate, ferchrissakes.

... less,

I have no solution on this one, but as a quick hack I would start by searching for tab characters, or more-than-one space characters. The terminal highlight should help.

... vi,

This works just fine in vim (not sure about vanilla vi):

:set list listchars=tab:\\_

That makes all hard tabs look like \___. Replace with prettier unicode line-art as you wish. I maintain a non-python codebase with some rather... creative... variations of whitespace, and it is trivial to match local whitespace conventions with listchars enabled.

... emacs

I'm not an emacs guy, but if vim has a solution then I'd put money on the existence of an emacs solution.

I never got a straight answer to how python deals with a mixture of tabs and space characters in the indenting.

I do work with python regularly, and I still can't answer this. The practical solution is "don't mix indentation styles." While it is more than zero effort to do this, it should be all up-front effort learning the capabilities of your tools, and trivial effort day-to-day.

In fact, it's very popular to pull over when rain/snow/fog is so thick.

It doesn't take much snow to cover lane markings, and pulling over is not a practical response to a fresh layer of snow. Snowfall is a different story, but snow on the ground is the problem at hand:

And now that white line is very reflective on almost all roads (speaking from the US at least), it seems that, if anything, we can tone down the headlights.