I'm only an amateur, but I doubt there are string players that "learn" equal temperament. I have no idea how I would find 440 * (2^(1/12) ^ n) Hz, for any n not a multiple of 12, in the way that I can find 440 * (4/3) Hz, or 440 * (3/2) Hz, etc. When playing with equaled tempered instruments like piano, you just listen for clashes and adjust dynamically, which is only going to happen in slower, sustained passages.
And you're right, we don't play "based entirely on just intervals." What we do is constantly adjust our intonation depending on whether we need it to be "just" with respect to something else (like other notes in a chord), or whether we are free to use a more "melodic" intonation. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaYOwIIvgHg for a good demonstration -- note that he talks in formal terms like "play x in the Pythagorean system," but I think you can largely see this as a rationalization of what players do naturally).
Finally, the presence of vibrato doesn't really obviate intonation concerns, sadly. There's a lot of theoretical debate about how the pitch of a vibrated note is perceived (is it the highest pitch in the range that determines whether the note sounds in tune? etc.), but in practice you can easily verify that adding vibrato to an out-of-tune scale will not make it sound any more in tune, nor will adding it to a shift mask a slightly-missed shift (if only!).
I hear you. People keep saying Spanish is an easier language than English, but yesterday I pulled up an article written in Spanish and I couldn't even read the first word.
This argument doesn't really have any content, because people who advocate for programming with higher order functions would not agree that such code is more clever; in fact, they would probably argue the opposite. What's the point of debating if you assume the people on the other side already agree with you?
True. Of course, that only scratches the surface of why it's a terrible job. In many locales, policies that cover commercial driving are prohibitively expensive, and the majority of drivers are effectively uninsured (often without realizing it). It's not a stretch to say that insurance fraud is a core part of that industry's business model.
I can't help but think that if we all had that mindset, we'd still be programming in assembly. People who don't care enough to criticize the status quo don't put forth the effort needed to change it.
Indeed. Ironically, the only reason we're in a thread talking about Go is years of "Go is so much simpler than language X" propaganda, without which it would have never gained such a hold in the industry zeitgeist.
It seems like there are basically two types of programmers: those that think that programming languages are "done," and those that disagree.
To the former type, any modern language is roughly as good as any other, by definition, unless you've got an unusual use-case that requires something really specific. Thus any attempt at language advocacy sounds like tribalism or elitism. The people in this camp love to make analogies to woodworking tools, since innovation there stopped a while ago (presumably).