Clang was made to support GCC extensions and be as close to a drop-in replacement for GCC as possible. Linux misses support for MSVC, Intel C Compiler, XL C and basically every other C Compiler ever written except for these 2.
And what if the body decides that the best thing for itself is crack cocaine? You don't want happiness per se, but a fulfilling and satisfying life.
Think about it, if you could wire yourself to a machine that injected all the happiness chemicals into your brain for the rest of your life would you do it?
"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."
Not entirely true. Human behavior boils down to the Big Five[1] and that's what we call personality. However, there is another thing which we generally refer to as "personal philosophy", or something of the sort.
In each of us there are four internal voices: sensation, rational thought, emotion and intuition. When you choose to listen to one or more of these voices you get a philosophical school. Plato is mainly intuitive with a touch of emotion. Aristotle is mainly rational with a touch of intuition. They're both western philosophers because eastern philosophy focuses a lot on the senses.
Here are some pure philosophies for each of the four voices, so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about:
* Sensation: Taoism
* Rational thought: Rationalism
* Emotion: Romanticism
* Intuition: Mysticism
However, philosophies are rarely pure, which is why there are so many of them.
Change is not necessary a good thing. Bad change is worse then no change at all. However, when it comes to programming frameworks, rapid, unstable, change is generally not very desirable. Take a look at the most popular open-source OS/kernel in the world: Linux.
It's a Unix-clone using a monolithic kernel made in a time when Lisp machines existed and microkernels were all the rage. It used ANSI C which, to be fair, was new at the time, but stuck with it, in the face of C99 and C++.
And, as a windowing system, it still uses X11, a system designed in the mid '80s. There has been a very slow migration towards Wayland (which is now already 10 years old).
As it's scripting language it uses bash (1989), which inherits a lot of it's characteristics from the Bourne shell (1977).
Yes, in the case of Linux may be a little bit biased as OS development back than was still more mature than front-end is now, but still, the principle still holds: "slow and steady wins the race".
I have to say I don't understand many things about your comment, so I'd be glad if you were to clear them for me.
1) You blame your "individualistic natures" for the appearance of pointless jobs. Now, I haven't lived in the US, but that seems odd to me. I live in Romania, a society that is profoundly focused on the community, and the abundance of pointless jobs, particularly in the communistic years (communism being a profoundly anti-individualistic ideology) was absolutely staggering.
It just seems to me pretty self-evident that, as you move the focus from the individual, and his own happiness, he will find less motivation to do a meaningful job, and be contempt with a pointless, but simpler job.
I may be missing something important here, as, again, everything I know about American culture I know from the internet, so, if I am, please feel free to tell me.
2) "Public jobs are low-paying and staffed with people who couldn't find jobs in the private sector, resulting in little incentive to do more than the absolute minimum."
I'm afraid I just don't follow here. Wouldn't the low pay motivate people to work at pulling themselves out of those jobs and into the private sector?
3) You claim, quite rightly, that companies are not concerned with the public good, just with their survival and/or success, and consider jobs given out as "saintly privileges".
Firstly, all of the modern advances of mankind, from the industrial revolution, to the ridiculously cheap products provided by Rockefeller, Edison, and the like, to the supercomputers almost every human in the civilized world carries with him in his pocket, were made, not in the interest of "the greater community", but in those people/companies' self-interest.
Secondly, which worker do you think is more productive? The one that says "I am owed this job by my company"? Or the one that says, "My job is nothing but a privilege given onto me by the company, and I must prove every day that I deserve it?"
In any case, I'd be really grateful if you could explain these points to me. Thanks in advance!!