I know a guy working at JPL doing Perl stuff for internal use still. I give him a hard time about it, but it's a lot cooler than Social_Widget_0003993986 in any other language you care to name.

"but it's a lot cooler"

Are you referring to the work or Perl? Most programmers I know working in a scientific area switched to Python years ago and run away screaming when they hear the work "Perl".

I cut my teeth on perl and don't run screaming when I see to this day. Perl has an undeserved bad rap. I like python as much as the next guy but frankly Perl does some things way better than python. And don't get me started on Pythons rules around scope.

Choice of language is quite marginal when it comes to determining the quality and utility of code.

Actually, it's been known for quite awhile that there's a factor of 2 to 3 times in productivity. That's not really marginal. Talent far outstrips that, though.

Indeed talent does. I make no claims about productivity. Your note is intriguing, references invited.

productivity != quality and utility

It doesn't equal utility, but it does equal quality, at least to the extent that bugs per SLOC matter. This has also been known for awhile, with data to back it up.

I'm not sure that's true. Though it obviously depends more on the programmer themself, the semantics of a language can make it easier, at least, to write higher quality code. For example, bounds checking removes a whole class of bugs (probably the most common in C) from the equation. I disagree that this effect could be described as "marginal".

yeah but other languages have better minima cause they hand-hold so much, like python

If your looking for a powerful canvas feature, qt is really your only choice. That's what swung me away from gtk and wx.

Or just write the fast bits in C, call it from Python via ctypes and get the GIL unlocked and parallelism for free.

If my projects were large enough to make that a more attractive option, sure, that's a great plan.

Usually when I've hit this situation I'm writing something simple but processor intensive, and it's easier for me (12 years commercial parallel/distributed C programming, amateur python enthusiast) to go back to home ground at this point.

Same here. As a nice side effect, QThread somehow makes signals work again, so you can Ctrl-C a MT Python program (you still have to set a handler for SIGINT but at least it works).

For this reason, I actually use QThread in console apps aswell.

If you are using QThread for console apps and are not using any other Qt libraries, isn't your console app has an unnecessary dependency on Qt ?

Qt's split up into separate libraries; QtCore is pretty much a general portable utility library like glib or APR, and it's perfectly reasonable for a console app to depend on it.

Well I guess it is "unnecessary" to the extent it is unnecessary to be able to Control-C your programs. Personally I like my programs to respond to signals.

So if mass and charge are both just attributes of particles, what is the "charge equivalent" of the Higgs boson? And if there isn't one, then why is it assumed the HB exists? Why cant particles have a innate "mass charge" in the same way they have an "electric charge"?

If it were simple why aren't these lawsuits being thrown out the front door? Why isn't FRAND turning out to be the watertight defence it ought to be? (serious question I would love to know the answer to, as these FRAND related lawsuits seem to keep coming up over and over again).

FRAND has no precise legal definition and has not had any reasonable test in court that would establish precedent, as far as I am aware.

Or if you really like Python 3 (as I do!) you can donate those $50 to Python 3 support in PyPy: http://pypy.org/py3donate.html

Any reason they can "fuck off"? Anyway, you're incorrect about pypy. "Real" python developers will likely not run their code in a sandboxed environment, so PyPy's security advantages are minimal, added to the fact that your sandbox is only as good as its configuration. The concurrency is interesting, but there are numerous other solutions available, and that alone makes it unlikely that the de facto implementation of the language would include one. Claiming that PyPy is better on compatibility than CPython is ridiculous; last time I looked, anything using a C extension had to be rewritten to use ctypes. On speed, yes PyPy is impressive. But in python, anything that is particularly CPU intensive should probably be written as a C extension and PyPy takes a hit when using ctypes iirc. In general, I don't see the point of people trying to optimize generic python code. Most code never gets profiled, and most code isn't a problem. At least, not a problem enough to switch interpreter. Definitely not a problem enough to ignore the massive problem that is python 2.x's unicode implementation.

> all the things real Python programmers care about

Guess I'm not a real programmer, then, since I find proper Unicode handling to be a welcome feature, and find the implementation in Python2 is painful.

I think you should take a walk, and then come back and read this ridiculous stuff you wrote.

It's easy to dismiss nice builtin Unicode support if you are an English speaker in an English speaking country where all applications you write can conveniently ignore other alphabets without meeting any complaints or problems.

Legal in what country?

>Google's is worse because it takes all rights to use your work however it likes, and then states in its Privacy Ppolicy that it won't use it for anything other than to provide the service.

Please point to the part of the Privacy Policy that deal with "my works" or "works that I create and own". I think if you look closely, the PP only deal with information Google collects about your usage of the service, which is quite different to works you upload to Drive.

> Well, first off, Google has a privacy policy [1] where they commit to not publishing my entire works without my consent.

It doesn't say that anywhere. The Privacy Policy covers "What information we collect and why we collect it.". In other words, the PP is about information they collect about you using the service, not stuff you upload to Drive. Think IP addresses, cookies, log-on times etc.

> Even without that, though -- what do you think would happen if they did what you're suggesting? I think the public punishment would be worse than any legal repercussions.

So your saying that TOS don't matter and we shouldn't read or analyse them because we trust Google wont do anything untoward? So we are we even having this discussion in the first place then?

> It doesn't say that anywhere. The Privacy Policy covers "What information we collect and why we collect it.". In other words, the PP is about information they collect about you using the service, not stuff you upload to Drive. Think IP addresses, cookies, log-on times etc.

I'm not so sure about that:

  We collect information in two ways:

  - Information you give us. [...]
  - Information we get from your use of our services. [...]

  [...]

  We will ask for your consent before using information for a
  purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.

> So your saying that TOS don't matter and we shouldn't read or analyse them because we trust Google wont do anything untoward?

Of course we should. And when we've read them, we should realize that if we want to use such services, we need to assign the provider certain rights to the content. Otherwise, the services couldn't exist. I'm just saying that I think the social contract is actually stronger, so the fallout from bad behavior would be worse punishment than the slaps on the wrist the US government would give. Of course, you don't have to agree with that, it's my belief.

> So we are we even having this discussion in the first place then?

Why indeed. Perhaps because more people have read lazy analyses such as the one linked, than honest analyses such as the one by The Verge (or even, gasp, read the whole actual TOS and made their on analysis), which several people has linked to in the comments. I suggest you read it.

Edit: Formatting, more nuanced language.