> how is an advanced society handling the practical matters of writing contracts and keeping records without it
By "it" I guess you mean grammatical plurals? It's indeed semantically redundant. Say in a context of contracts, how is "3000.00 dollar" in any way more ambiguous than "3000.00 dollars"? The Chinese language indeed has been supporting an advanced society without grammatical plurals for thousands of years.
> disparity between I can’t afford a car, and I will never be able to afford a car is vast
There's no disparity. Either way you're not going to own a car any time soon.
You're not freer when the legal system prevents you to do something because you don't have enough money than when the legal system prevents you from doing that thing for other reasons.
I am using sqlite in my project. It definitely solves problems, but I keep seeing overly arrogant and sometimes even irresponsible statements from their website, and can't really appreciate much of their attitude towards software engineering. The below quote from this CVE page is one more example of such statements.
> All historical vulnerabilities reported against SQLite require at least one of these preconditions:
> 1. ...
> 2. The attacker can submit a maliciously crafted database file to the application that the application will then open and query.
> Few real-world applications meet either of these preconditions, and hence few real-world applications are vulnerable, even if they use older and unpatched versions of SQLite.
Rust doesn't require you to think about concurrency if you don't use it either. For global variables you just throw in a thread_local. No unsafe required.
The site UI has been going downhill these years. It's become heavy and slow, and the buttons are more and more randomly placed. Like after you search for something in the repo, to go back to the repo front page you needed to click on the most unexpected button.
It's still getting things done, for sure, but no longer pleasant to work with.
Isn't it the other way around? I mean, I keep seeing western people advertising that the ways of living in those countries are wrong and they must change, while I don't often see anyone urging western countries to change their way of living.
You can't learn these from either Gaza or Ukraine. Neither is over. Not even close to an end. Both are longer and the technologically superior side suffered more than expected.
About the `if else` producing a value matter. Well, if you look at things that way, C can be said to be syntactic sugar of assembly, as for every C program you can write equivalent assembly. `if else` producing value is very useful because it allows you to write if else wherever a value is expected. You can call methods on an `if else` or pass one as an argument of function. When such an expression is sufficiently complex your equivalent code using non-value-producing `if else` would be a lot more verbose and unreadable.
This is equivalent to the `if let` syntax of Rust. In Rust at least this is treated as a special syntax but not a boolean. I once complained it's kinda confusing that it makes one think the `let` pattern matching syntax is a boolean expression which it is not, and the Rust people replied to me saying yeah it can be a boolean maybe at some point in the future. So yeah whether such syntax makes pattern matching a boolean really is just a matter of whether it's said to be one.
A thing that could be interesting particularly for hn folks: in China, you can sue entities for open source license violation citing American-origin licenses like GPL, and win. There are many such cases. So one can potentially sue e.g. Onyx over their Linux kernel usage and stop their violation. This hasn't happened probably simply because no one cared enough.
Then you have misunderstandings about urban warfare. Bakhmut is urban warfare. It's actually called an urban meat grinder, the worst form of urban warfare. Civilian casualties at Bakhmut is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than total casualties per different sources and estimates. 80% civilian casualties and 50% being women and children is not "at best urban warfare."
By "it" I guess you mean grammatical plurals? It's indeed semantically redundant. Say in a context of contracts, how is "3000.00 dollar" in any way more ambiguous than "3000.00 dollars"? The Chinese language indeed has been supporting an advanced society without grammatical plurals for thousands of years.