"If there were a super-efficient hammering machine, it could be better to figure out ways to use nails to replace screws in designs than to hold onto screws just for nostalgia's sake."
How about for the sake of the bridge continuing to stand? Or is that not a good enough reason for the accountants?
Just to put it in perspective, most Scala programmers rejected Scala3 before it was even written. The Scala team, in their infinite wisdom with a collective 2 years of professional programming under their belt knew better. Nobody switched and Scala2 has been slowly dying with their neglect ever since.
PS The Scala team should have been fixing their type inference engine which lacked some important features and needed a better (Horn clause based) architecture. They did a complete rewrite instead.
Python is preferred because Python programmers are cheaper than other languages. Not because of any sort of technical advantages. Its literally the worse performing programming language in popular use. And it uses invisible characters in its syntax. Truly, it is the VHS of our industry.
javac doesn't really do a whole lot. Consequently, whatever compile time you are complaining about would be worse with any other compiled language. Most optimization work in Java happens at runtime.
"proving code correct has been a research topic at some point."
It has been an area of active research for 40 years. But almost all the research returned the null result, meaning that the program proving didn't improve code quality (basically it didn't work). Yet somehow a group of programmers, usually fresh out of academia falls for program proving each generation. Strong types do really help but you need a good compiler which is sometimes lacking in the real work cough Scala cough. The problem with strong types and program proving is that the juice just isn't worth the squeeze meaning the extra time taken doesn't result in reduced debugging time or improved code quality. I don't think that changes with LLMs. It just exposes the flaws more quickly.
Again, you are confusing causalities (wounded and dead) with KIA (just the dead). That's why you are getting such different numbers. Its a pretty easy mistake to make and there are lots of media reports that make the same mistakes.
PS Also, some numbers count civilians and others just count military. And usually civilian dead > military dead in most wars.
Sigh, because certain civilizations wrote things down more than others. Also, some environments don't lend themselves to preserving things, others are. These will naturally create biases because if you are studying somewhere wet, almost nothing not made of stone will survive, even and especially things that are written upon. In the desert, things will be preserved for centuries, including things made of clay, leather or paper.
China is the one exception actually. India, Africa and the New World civilizations didn't really like focusing on the past and didn't record it. Europe and China did. In China that's probably about the strength of the bureaucracy. In Europe its probably more about kings establishing legitimacy.
I completely disagree. It does a really good job of showing the relative sizes of political entities throughout history and how those things impact the total amount of conflict. I might suggest that perhaps your politics is impacting how you view this data because perhaps it doesn't align with your ideology. It would be useful to overlay total population sizes only this data as well. That would bring out the historical trends much more accurately. And it is ignoring these political and technology trends that leads to the most wrong things humanities professors will try to claim. Perhaps that's why you don't like it. It disproves graphically a lot of ideological viewpoints.
PS Pinker talks a lot about these types of trends. Maybe look him up for better explanations.
Dude, software itself is written in English, not just English but it is most often (but not always) encoded in a character set that is English specific (can't even do French). The docs for every single platform, API and language are in English. You can get translations for some stuff and auto-translate the rest. But you can't even file a bug without English. The people you know probably don't write software, they are probably using computers to scam people and deploy software written by others to aid in that.
"So, calling English the global lingua franca is in my opinion rather based on a selection bias on specific countries."
In software, if you don't speak English, you don't really exist. Same for pilots and some other industries. Spanish programmers will need to learn English even for jobs in Spain. I have no idea what you are talking about.
I don't think that is really true. I think what's true is that people like private nursing care but its really expensive. Its less expensive if you have a large influx of cheap labor.
Have you ever worked for a European company? You could say the exact same things about every country on the planet except the US version is probably less extreme. Also the US companies are probably more complex to run so its more visible. I once worked for a company that probably manages some of your retirement. They had a team of 50 people working on a compiler for an internal language. Not a single person on that team knew how to actually write a compiler and the executive in charge was both the most arrogant and least capable executive I have ever worked with. So the idea that this is somehow US specific is pretty absurd.
How about for the sake of the bridge continuing to stand? Or is that not a good enough reason for the accountants?