Ada users are mainly rolling their eyes at the Rust fad. And the gurus are happy to point out where Rust fails. But Rust is the right direction. It boggles the mind that we are now 1,000 years into using unsafe languages and there is finally some attention to the problem in the mainstream mindset. Oh, crap, this is going to get flagged as flamebait. Sorry. But still....

Maybe we should get everyone to use taller chairs.

"a pig rolling around in its own filth"

Pigs do not roll around in their own filth. Confined to a pen with a feed trough, they will poop and pee only at the farthest point in the pen from their food, then return to the "clean" portion of the pen. There is almost literal line of demarcation defining the pooping area.

"Any Slashdot readers have their own memories to share about Pascal?"

I had my first Macintosh in the Spring of 1984, and somehow a beta version of MacPascal was given to me. It later came out as an official release. It was a GUI IDE with debugger running an interpreter, doing 96-bit floating point. This evolved into an even more-capable IDE with compiler and linker and was called THINK Pascal. I used this for many years on a Mac II (80-bit floating point in Motorola hardware FPU). Eventually, this went away and I switched to Codewarrior Pascal which required a bit of recoding and emulating THINK Pascal's graphics window. When Codewarrior dropped support for Pascal, I was looking at yet another re-write to some other dialect of Pascal. Instead, I switched to Ada which I use to this day as my main language. (My work is technical calculations in signal processing—audio and radar). Had I known of the long-term viability of Free Pascal Compiler at the time of switching to Ada, I likely would have stuck with Pascal. But Ada is a lovely language IMHO and I have no regrets. Julia currently serves my small, one-off projects.

Wood is the future! https://hardware.slashdot.org/...

Discussions such as this Slashdot article and thousands of others over the years just leave Ada programmers shaking their heads in wonderment.

From TFA:

"Examples of memory safe language include C#, Go, Java®, Ruby, Rust®, and Swift®."

Mind-boggling that Ada is not listed as an "example."

Why?

"Compute" is a verb. Stop using it as a noun. It makes one look illiterate.

No mention of water resistance in the article? Apple prominently advertises that its watches are "water resistant" to 50 meters. It's even engraved on the back where there is little space for information. Many people have found this promise to be a big lie. My wife is one. After only her third time swimming in a 2 m swimming pool, where she was swimming _on_top_ of the water, her watch refused to sense the "raise" motion which illuminates the display when the wrist is moved upward for reading. Apparently the accelerometer had succumbed to the ~ 1 m depth. I supposed that the accelerometer is also used in a Kalman filter with the GPS and that the GPS would then also not work. That turned out to be correct. Of course this happened just one month after the warranty expired. There are a _lot_ of people online pissed about this problem. Maybe we'll get a little class action going....

What kind of technical advisors do U.S. lawmakers have who tell them that putting servers in the U.S. makes it impossible for them to be accessed from China? Or is this apparent ignorance purposeful?

Before Alaska became a state of the United States in 1959, the incidence of short-sightedness (also known as near-sightedness) among the native Aleuts was almost zero. After attaining statehood, the government opened schools and Aleut children became school students, spending large amounts of time reading which they had not done before. Almost immediately, the incidence of near-sightedness shot up to around 25%.

It is known that in a person's early years, an exquisitely fine-tuned chemical feedback loop is active in determining the final shape of the cornea, the part of the eye that performs most of the refraction of light necessary for a focused image on the retina. (The lens provides a secondary, variable, stage to adjust for distance.) It seems that in some fraction of people who spend a lot of time focusing on a nearby object such as a book or cell phone, that feedback loop decides that the best shape of the cornea is that which provides a default focusing for near objects, with the deformable lens unable to correct in the sense opposite to that for which it was intended.

It this is correct, having children spend more time outside would seem to be helpful but this probably does not recognize the underlying cause, which is not that kids spend too much time indoors per se but that they spend too much time reading. The increase in nearsightedness around the world in recent years quite possibly relates to increased time looking at smart phones. Of course there is likely a connection to how much different cultures encourage academic performance.

It is interesting to speculate that if susceptible children could be identified, they could be given "pre-corrective" lenses to wear only while reading or using a phone, tricking the feedback loop to settle on a more-normal cornea shape.

I'm sorry that I can't provide a reference for the Alaska story, but I am sure it sits somewhere on my bookshelf.

This is just more crap science because there was no control group. Doing actual science—with a control group—is hard. Doing crap science is easy, and it's all too easy to get it published.

"The Wolfram Language has nearly 6,000 built-in functions." Find this at https://www.wolfram.com/langua....

If you think this is overkill then you have never used Mathematica which is probably true of most of the people commenting here. And you don't have any clue about how Mathematica is used or why anyone would choose to use it over Python, Perl, PHP, or Excel. Mathematica stands in a league of its own.

There is so much misunderstanding and misinformation about vinyl records versus CD and other high-quality digital formats including most streams, much of which is expressed in this Slashdot page.

Vinyl is not a technically better medium than digital, say, CD-quality digital or high-quality bit-reduced digital. Vinyl has worse signal-to-noise ratio which gets worse every time a record is played, it has less bandwidth (bandwidth is the range of frequencies that can be correctly reproduced) which also gets worse each time the record is played, and has less longevity. Vinyl records can warp which causes wow upon playback (wow is a frequency modulation at 33 1/3 rpm due to misshapen records). Record players become part of a feedback loop in which the player vibrates from the sound impinging upon it from the loudspeakers which causes uneven frequency response and in extreme cases can howl with a sustained oscillation. The life of records can be extended somewhat by meticulously cleaning them each time before playing but CDs etc. are extremely robust.

Vinyl records are not better than digital simply because they are analog because vinyl records these days are recorded and processed digitally before being converted to analog for pressing into vinyl. A completely analog-produced recording can bypass any controversial issues about the analog-to-digital conversion process but in contemporary practice that step is taken in preparing a digital recording for analog reproduction on vinyl and the end user doesn't even have a choice in D-to-A converter.

Perhaps the single most important reason that vinyl is experiencing a resurgence besides hipsterism is that in many if not most cases **the vinyl record does not contain the same signal as the digital version such as CD.** It is a fact, although not a well-known fact, that many vinyl releases contain versions of the music which has been subject to **less dynamic range compression.** I have seen this personally by listening and by comparing waveforms and artist-producers such as Jack White have commented explicitly about this. It is not clear why this bizzare-seeming practice is employed since, as stated earlier, digital has more dynamic range than vinyl.

Other factors have already been mentioned, such as taking pleasure in holding something physical and having liner notes to learn about the music and artists—CDs obviously can also have liner notes so this argues against streaming media only.