None of your scenarios are especially likely. Intergalactic travel is too energy-expensive to be a reasonable solution for any of the scenarios you outline.

That sounds even more expensive and even more worthless than invasion.

Yahoo already has a history of rolling over for the Chinese government. If Canonical doesn't mind associating with a company that helps oppressive regimes track down dissidents, I don't think Microsoft's announcement is going to make much difference.

C is a statically compiled language, so you can't really build a system like SLIME for it. SLIME needs to be connected to a running VM that it can push code to dynamically. C wasn't designed with that capability in mind.

What doesn't work?

Visual Studio doesn't support any programming language with macros, unless someone has made a Boo plugin whilst I wasn't looking.

Or did you mean keyboard macros? Because you don't need to write any code for that, either. Now, I don't think Emacs is as quite good as Vim for defining keyboard macros, but it's certainly better than Visual Studio.

I can think of plenty of features that SLIME has, but VS does not. However, I can't think of any feature in VS that is not matched by either Emacs itself, SLIME or some other extension.

Could you explain why you think VS is better?

Anyone that claims Visual Studio is a useful IDE hasn't used Emacs SLIME :)

Henry VIII planned to assassinate Louis XIV?! The plot thickens!

I don't think you understand what socialism and communism are. Patents are a form of government regulation. Socialists and communists are not about small government; quite the opposite. Rather, eliminating patents would be a minarchist or anarchist action.

I'm just took one of the examples on their page. Presumably their system is smart enough to work out the mimetype of the file, but I agree that it seems rather brittle and ambiguous.

Probably. There's no difference in length between:

get the last item of line 2 of URL url

And:

open(url).readlines[1].split(",").last

I guess the former is easier to read, but languages that have a lot of "magic" in them tend to be pretty bad at scenarios the developers didn't think of. Which will inevitably turn out to be something you want to do.

Yes, I realise all that. I was just pointing out that all functional languages use "recursive style", as ls671 puts it.

Well, all functional programming languages use recursion, so "recursive style functional programming languages" is a bit redundant :)

I'm not sure what you mean by "recursive style", but the biggest commercial users of functional programming languages tend to be companies behind high-traffic websites that need to handle a lot of concurrent requests. Facebook developed their real-time chat application in Erlang, for instance, and Twitter uses Scala to handle its message queue.

You really think they don't want more user data? You don't seem to understand how important good data is when trying to predict what a user wants. More data usually beats better algorithms.