Why would musk stop his pet ai doing what he wants it to do? He’s never done that in the past.

What on earth is the point of that? I know the borrow checker is hard to please and hard to learn, but surely memory safety is the main point of rust? You may as well write in C.

Good plan. One paradigm shift at time! All the best with the rust project.

Functional programming is very different in how you get stuff done.

I would recommend learning Elm first for functional programming before trying anything hairier like Haskell etc.

Elm is a small and lovely language for writing web pages/sites/user interfaces, and has a blisteringly fast compiler that is also the most genuinely helpful of all the compilers I’ve ever used.

It’s a blissfully stable antidote to JavaScript’s exhausting “that whole approach is so last month” churn.

I think the borrow checker is trying to tell me to use clone on recursive calls inside a double nested loop!

Rust is not a hard language to use or learn

Rust is a superb language, but it is famously not easy to learn.

Thank you.

The UK has more of a set of conventions and principles than a constitution. We found out how weak that is when Boris Johnson broke the rules of Parliament to avoid losing a vote on Brexit, and made the Queen lie about it publicly in the formal announcement of the proroguement.

One of the principles is that no Parliament can bind its successor. For example, there was a fixed term parliaments law from 2010 or so that said that you need a two thirds majority to call an election before five years is up (rather than at whatever time suits the incumbent prime minister); when a new Parliament was elected in 2015, one of the first things they did was rescind that law, with a simple majority.

I worry that Farage, friend to trump and follower of Bannon, will become prime minister and lead us to such destruction that we will write an actual constitution, but that didn’t do America any good once the supreme court was stuffed with Republicans loyal to trump.

I think the trick is to not elect tyrants, but Putin’s propaganda reaches worldwide and the far right is rising everywhere. Perhaps it really will be global thermonuclear war this time.

Can’t resist correcting “you’re”! Sorry sorry sorry.

Do you always use literally literally, and are you careful not to talk about the enormity of perfectly innocent large things?

Language changes. People make mistakes. Neither is worth getting too upset about.

Question: you don’t believe in the flying spaghetti monster or that the moon landings were faked?

Perfectly acceptable answer grammatically: No.

This is excellent. We should never have left the EU.

I’m not Chinese, but in Mandarin, he and she are both pronounced “ta” (first tone, flat intonation), even though they’re written differently.

Removed by mod

Exactly. I wouldn’t touch a chromebook with a barge pole. Who wants Google to watch absolutely everything you do?

Yes.

Happy Christmas!

Lol no, they did not!

NERDS WORK VERY HARD INDEED AND FIX BUGS IN MASSIVE NUMBERS OF SYSTEMS doesn’t sell papers.

For that matter, neither does TEENAGERS WORK NIGHT AND DAY IN UNPRECEDENTED LEVELS OF REVISION AND EXAM PREPARATION AND BREAK PREVIOUS SUCCESS RECORDS AGAIN BECAUSE TEACHERS AND SCHOOLS ARE GRADED AS FAILING UNLESS RESULTS RISE CONTINUOUSLY. Can you tell I have friends in the teaching profession?!

This is a fair point. I’m a programmer and this kind of banter is not super common in my workplace. We are all a little bit odd in our own ways.

I remember it well.

The newspapers were apoplectic about the coming millennium bug Armageddon (hospital equipment was all going to crash because programmers encoded a date as two digits to save what was then rather sparse memory and storage space, and everyone was going to accidentally become of negative age and all timers would temporarily give very wrong answers.

COBOL programmers: there’s a serious issue with banking and other business systems and we need to concentrate on this above above other issues to resolve it
Managers and newspapers: ARMAGEDDON!
COBOL programmers: we’ve got this.
Newspapers: nobody is doing anything about it! Armageddon!
COBOL programmers: It’s a lot of work but we’re cracking on, we’ve been working at it a while and it’s going to be tight and we’re going to need to put in some overtime, but really, we’ve got this.
Newspapers: OH FUCK LITERALLY EVERYTHING IS GOING TO CRASH

Millienium dawns. Some slight issues remain. Most important systems already patched and fine. Society does not crash.

Newspapers: There was no millennium bug after all!
COBOL programmers: no, there was, but we fixed it like we said we needed to and then we did. Boy, that was hard work.
Newspapers: It was ALL A HOAX.
COBOL programmers: no, it was a problem and we fixed it.
Newpapers: CELEBRITY WOMAN WEARS DRESS.
COBOL programmers: we just see the world differently, I guess. Can I retire early with all this emergency business critical overtime money?

That’s the first time anyone called me pops! NOW I feel old!