"beats" is doing a *lot* of work here. There are literally hundreds of definitions of "beats"

And if "beats" = "better long-term run-time performance of specific high-memory, high-CPU tasks when the on-GC program is written by high-skill programmers who have had a year or two to find all the memory leaks", then I absolutely agree.

But my experience has been that situation is fairly rare. Granted there are a bunch of other very specific definitions of "beats" for which your statement could be considered true.

More to my point, I have found that claims of "A beating B all the time" often reveal a lack of understanding that problem domains are incredibly diverse, and the chance of a solution being the optimal one in all (or almost all) problem spaces is essentially zero. Being pro or anti-GC is as sensible as being pro or anti-hammer.

(And sorry for picking on your turn of phrase, but I have dealt with far too many projects where damage has been done by those who have morphed processes or tools or technological approaches into near dogma. I consider that tendency harmful and thus I found your sentiment worth of comment.)

One other (and I think underappreciated) reason for teaching programming (at least in a basic level) is to enhance the personal ability to both process and create unambiguous sets of instructions, a skill that is almost a necessity of our current life.

It's interesting (and instructive) to watch how difficult many, if not most, people find a set of instructions that is more than 3-5 steps, let alone the 10+ steps it might take to simply get one's TV hooked up, understand the fire-safety memo, etc. (Not helped by the fact that often the instructions themselves are bad.) I see a this in quite a variety of people who suffer under what is almost a form of illiteracy, requiring some external help to navigate mutli-step instructions.

It's a pretty much vital skill that could be taught using a variety of subjects, and (at least to the level required to function in modern society) it's a skill that the vast majority can learn. (There are parallels to literacy here.)

Programming doesn't have to be the vehicle used to teach this skill, but it's likely to be the only one that practical for high schools. It's why I believe 1/2 - 1 semester of programming should be mandatory, despite the challenges of finding those who can teach the material.

> into a Swedish sauna,

Swedish?? Heresy! You mean Finnish.

Surveys like this are like best-seller lists. A *real* best-seller list (i.e. one that literally shows which book titles are selling best) consists of 8 "Chicken Soup for the xx Soul" and some other titles that are boring as all get out. No one wants to read about that.

A "best seller" list of programming languages is like that. I don't want to know which languages are most used. I can just look around for that.

No, I want to be entertained by an article that shows "What do other programmers *think* should be the most used?" tuned with little (but not too much) real-world relevancy. The headline makes it *feel* relevant, and I have something that I can argue about with my colleagues, wonder about whether I should be learning, etc.

Thus language surveys like this are far more entertaining and useful than something that was actually accurate ("For the 12th year in a row, the 175,000 COBOL programmers keep first place, but are facing challenges from the 150,000 SQL programmers.")

Articles aren't science, they're the transmission of information about science. And some media would like to be paid directly, and some prefer to inundate us with ads.

As for science, that is almost anything but free.

> We were told it 250k US deaths minimum by May even with the lockdown, 2+ million without. Here we are almost June and it still hasn't hit 100k.

Well, in fairness, that's vastly better than the other way around.

In case you forget, we had Northern Italy as a fairly graphic example of how things could go south very, very quickly.

And as for the economy, that was going to grind to a halt one way or another. If the country-side didn't lock down, there'd have been enough migration from infected zones to ensure they were hit as well, but usually with worse healthcare access.

Or has been widely pointed out, you can have the economy close down because people engage in widespread social distancing (much of the world, including Sweden) or you can have massive waves of illness and then the economy closes down because everyone is cowering in their homes, except vital services are closed as well.

To be honest, only the Americans could make COVID-19 a culture war issue.

Not saying this wasn't deliberate, but I've certainly seen similar mistakes made when someone sorted the spreadsheet, then graphed by column.

On the other hand, that instance never made it out of the lab, although people were teasing the author for months later.

Sure, the education may go downhill, but that's not the value they provide to the customer (student). The value is in the degree. Earnings of those who earn a degree are massively higher than those who are 1 credit short despite nearly identical knowledge acquired.

Unless companies start the very expensive process of testing employees knowledge themselves, they'll continue to rely on the piece of paper. And thus it is that piece of paper is what is valuable, not what the student learns.

People recognize this, and will continue to fork out huge amounts of money for the piece of paper. The fact that the learning may be much diminished will be almost immaterial to the value they provide the students. Those that opt for learning over the degree will continue to be punished by the market.

And those professions that have some sort of matriculation exam? The standards they measure aren't fixed. They are meant to control the flow of new entrants. Learning goes down, the test standards will go down to keep the flow the same.

At least, as the fortunate holder of a degree, that is what I have observed. I've been continuously paid much better than those who are more talented but didn't have the piece of paper, even 30 years later.

> Which means we cannot be chasing away heavy industry between now and then the way we have been for the last 50 years.

This reminds me of people fighting gentrification. It's a losing battle because you are fighting fundamental economic forces. It can be done, but it's like trying to push water uphill. Every step will be difficult, and it's almost impossible to win in the long term.

The US is wealthy, and thus low-value jobs with massive externalities are welfare destroying. You cannot sustain US levels of wealth with jobs that just don't produce a very high return. You want a traditional job like 60 years ago, then you get a life style like 60 years ago, which would make most people howl in outrage.

Mourning the loss of heavy industry is only a step or two above mourning the loss of hunting and trapping as suitable careers. Do we mourn subsistence farming next? They are all occupations not fit for a wealthy country.

China isn't the world's manufacturer because that's the best outcome, it's the world's manufacturer because that's the best that a massively poor country could become. I'm certain it would (and perhaps will) be happy to switch places with the US in terms of GDP per capita by tossing all that manufacturing for jobs that make real money.

(That said, manufacturing that doesn't use humans *is* pretty high margin. But it still has to deal with the externalities it inflicts on the surrounding people.)

I suspect the employers whose work force cares heavily about Open Source and employers whose work force have mortgages and a family is a pretty small intersection set. And I suspect that it is the former set of employees that answers surveys like this one.

This is good advise for companies whose coders are under 30. For companies where most of the coders are 40+, not so much.

I was aware that he was making a point. I was attempting to reinforce it. But Poe's law being Poe's law, I probably wasn't clear.

Ah well.

> Perhaps everyone should work without pay until the crisis is past.

Don't be stupid. I'm a real person and I need my earnings in order to survive.

Authors, on the other hand, aren't people, per se, and certainly don't need to buy groceries or pay their rent. Obviously they should have their work expropriated without compensation when it would be useful for the rest of us.

--

More seriously, I imagine a lot of authors are okay with the Archive's actions. But the idea of being upset with authors being upset about having their earnings expropriated reeks of hypocrisy.

> I mean, even Boeing didn't feel obligated to put good software into the 737 MAX, an airplane

And look what happened to Boeing.

There *is* accountability, but it tends to be in a form that is exactly wrong for teaching lessons effectively. It really is a tipping point culture.

Rather than small punishments applied immediately after making dangerous but profitable decisions, there are rewards for years, and then suddenly a *massive* punishment for going beyond a line that nobody could define until a company was already past it.

Makes it very hard to sound rational when you posit that the bad case scenario is corporate extinction. Makes you sound like an doom-sayer, which is instantly dismissed everywhere I've worked. People can evaluate a policy with a 50% chance of losing millions. They can't really do the math on a 95% chance of making a tidy profit, and a 5% chance it bankrupts the company.

> I am sorry for Canadians right now, glad I am not one, and hope you get such nonsense rejected...

The trouble is that we Canadians (in my opinion mistakenly) blame many of the US' political woes on the free-speech nature of the Internet.

If the promoters can frame it as a choice between "calm just-the-excesses" regulation versus "descent into American-style political tribalism", they have a decent chance of most Canadians choosing regulation.

"It should not be so difficult to retract a paper, and it should not be considered an act of courage to publicly admit it... "

The writer fails to consider the modern environment in which all science takes place.

Sure, this retraction will affects hundreds of scientists in the field, and for the sake of that science the retraction should be easy and relatively painless.

But in the era of social media, this retraction could be discussed everywhere, and the social consequences of the retraction could affect billions. All this because social media forces us to look at *everything* in the context of greater social conflict. And every action could be used as a weapon in that conflict.

In such an environment, the only lens for examining any action is the maximal possible social consequence of the action in the context of an existentialist battle for survival. Inconsequential things like science are no longer justification for your choices when they could affect billions.

I'm already seeing the retraction used to attack women and the Chinese in science. No doubt we will soon see attacks on the scientist for enabling these attackers by choosing to retract.

And to think when I was young, I looked forward to the everyone having access to all the worlds information at our fingertips. *sigh*.