It's not unusual for a criticism of JS to be anachronistic.

"use strict" is basically obsolete. Modules are assumed to be strict. Besides, why do you complain that you have to actually specify that you want variable declarations to be sane, and then complain that you can't turn it off?

Similarly, the complaint about undeclared variables is a thing of the past.

Including files is not a good thing, unless maybe you're doing CSS. The fact that you can do it in C doesn't make it good, and in fact you could very easily argue that the fact that you can do it in C makes C a little less good. JS has modules. Before it did, it had a way to emulate them, however painfully.

If I saw "" + [1,2] + [3,4], my first thought would be, "why the hell would you write code like that?" No language prevents anyone coding in it from writing bad code, and openly using implicit type conversion and then complaining about how implicit type conversion is done seems slightly disingenuous. Conversion is definitely bad, perhaps the worst thing about JS (and you picked probably the tamest possible example of it), but at least you have the tools to never have to use it unless you do so on purpose.

So all of this stuff has been in the language officially for at least 2 years. The fact that we're still stuck using ES5 is not a function of the language, it's a function of browser companies (mostly Microsoft, since we can't code to Edge until everyone starts using Windows 10+). JS has a checkered past at best, and it still suffers some of that legacy (the aforementioned implicit conversion, as well as this pseudo-class-based gobbledygook that people seem to insist on using when a perfectly simple, powerful prototype-based option is right there in front of them).

I'm not saying it's perfect, far from it. But it's much, much better than it used to be. And it isn't PHP.

One thing about CCP is that they've never been afraid to try something that other game companies haven't been willing to do, and unfortunately early innovation leads to failure more often than not. They've demonstrated the capability of doing good work on relatively innovative projects - even MMOs of that scale were not exactly common when Eve came out in 2003 - but of course they're going to fuck up sometimes. They're going to fuck up most of the time. That's the nature of innovation.

The things that CCP has failed on have been things that other companies haven't even been willing to try. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on your point of view.

The comparison between games that have a restrictive set of rules and those that do not is the wrong comparison to be making.

The reason WHY computers tend to do well at game with restrictive sets of rules is because they're able to take those rules and fashion them into a set of all (or at least a significant portion of) possible positions that are going to come up in the game that they're playing.

That's not a valid solution to Go because the number of possible positions, even in the context of an individual game, is too vast to be able to use a brute force approach. Despite having a "restrictive rule set", just like chess does, Go does not allow for the same kind of "AI" (which isn't really AI at all) to solve it. The comparison here should be between games where brute force is possible and games where it isn't. The size of the rule book is meaningless.

So no, just because you can write the rules on one page doesn't mean that you can just unleash a supercomputer at it and suddenly it beats grandmasters. That happened in chess. What's happening here is much more profound.

One of the many lovely things about PHP, though this time it's not the only culprit.

$ php -r 'var_dump("foo" == TRUE); var_dump("foo" == 0); var_dump(TRUE == 0);'
bool(true)
bool(true)
bool(false)

$ php -r 'var_dump(NULL == 0); var_dump(NULL < -1);'
bool(true)
bool(true)

Strange, and not in a good way. Makes the mathematical part of my brain explode.

See Table 6: Ex-Offenders and the Labor Market

At least according to one study, race is a big part of it. It's not the only part - level of education appears to have as big an effect - but it's clear that a black felon is much less employable than a white felon.

I know it's just a summary and all, but it makes me feel vaguely sad that out of all of the things you can say about him, Kent Beck is tagged as a "Facebook programmer."