> What’s happened, of course, with FORTRAN is that it has become the lingua franca of the computing world. It is the one language that everybody understands to some level of detail — it is on every computer, in every country, made by every manufacturer — and one could learn to use FORTRAN reading books at every level of complexity, written in every language on the surface of the earth. It is universal, like the air we breathe, and I don’t think it’s going to be displaced for a long time to come.
I suddenly understand part of why experienced programmers seem to find Rust so much more difficult than those who are just beginning to learn. Years of C++ trauma taught them to ignore the content of the error messages. It doesn't matter how well they're written if the programmer refuses to read.
The Anglo-Saxon migrations made England English, and then the waves of Viking invasions littered North Germanic vocabulary all over it. You can see it in doublets like skirt/shirt that aren't in other West Germanic languages.
Rather than downvoting you, I will speak up to say I don't see what you're seeing. Spaces around hyphens, yeah, sure, but LLMs prefer em dashes, and even that is unreliable, because it's borrowed from habits that real humans have had for many years.
For me, the more important indicator is the content. I see reports of personal experience, and thoughts that are not completely explained (because the reader is expected to draw the rest of the owl). I don't see smugly over-the-top piles of adjectives filling in for an inability to make critiques of any substance. I don't see wacky asides amounting to argumentum ad lapidem, accomplishing nothing beyond insulting readers who disagree with a baseless assertion.
I think it's likely you have drawn a false positive.
> If we took the same approach to other engineering, we'd be constantly tearing down houses and rebuilding them just because we have better nails now. It sure would keep a lot of builders employed though.
This is almost exactly what happens in some countries.
I was curious how you arrived at that figure so I checked the dates. Servo began in 2012 as a Mozilla skunkworks project, died off in 2020, and was revived in late 2023. If you simply subtract the "dead" period, sure, it doesn't look like it was going anywhere fast, but that's ignoring the multiple major changes in direction and the 5+ years during which Servo development was fully subordinate to Firefox development. It only became a fully independent browser development effort after the project was revived by Igalia.
> permits the operator of a motor vehicle to turn such vehicle right at a red stop light after stopping
Quoting GP, emphasis again mine:
> the driver glanced to his left and without stopping or looking in my direction, turned right across my path
The driver turned without stopping. That is explicitly and clearly illegal throughout the US.
This is one of those rules drivers are supposed to be trained on (and tested on) before being given a license, but it doesn't seem to stick.
The Wikipedia article notes that allowing turn-on-red became widespread in response to fuel scarcity. Fuel efficiency is dramatically higher in modern vehicles. Maybe it's time to repeal it after all.
If only there was public interest in public safety...
"I met a traveler from an antique land..."