* Posts by JLV

2252 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

You want how much?! Israel opts not to renew its Office 365 vows

JLV
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Re: Balls

One of the only political rallies I've ever attended was a pro-Palestine demonstration. Some of the most impressive people there were Jews insisting on a two state solution. Really uplifting, and restores Jewish honor, compared to the lot running the show in Israel at the moment. One would think that Israelis know exactly what it means to be deprived of one's country.

Antisemitic, me? I will personally admit to feeling much more kinship with Jews and their culture than Arabs. But that doesn't make Israel's position right. And Arabs did not cause the Holocaust. Westerners, not Arabs, did it or let it happen so playing that card ad infinitum to justify any and all abuses is dishonest.

I'll also be the first to admit that Hamas and Hizbollah will shed blood at the first sign of meaningful Israeli negotiations (you do remember Rabin, though?) And that Palestinians are far from perfect.

None of that makes your post less distasteful, Balls. If nothing else, not empathy for an entire people's suffering, not ethics, not international law, not a sense of justice, then realpolitik savvy alone would suggest negotiating from Israel's current position of military and internal demographic strength, while the USA is not yet too preoccupied with China's ascension to limit it's veto's usefulness. Who's to say what things will look like in 50, 100 years?

To conclude: best wishes to Israel's position wrt to MS. All my sympathy, nitwits like Balls, and Bob, in full form, aside.

Python wriggles onward without its head

JLV

Re: Now seems like the perfect time...

>with the PEPs, Python already has a process for proposing changes

Not to mention that the PEP process is open to anyone with a recognizably good idea to contribute to the language fundamentals. It is accepted for relatively new (to Python) programmers to contribute on PEPs that they have particular qualifications on and there are procedures in place to assist them. You don't have to be a core member to participate, though you will have to convince the core members your idea is a good one.

For example, PEP 282, concerning the now-standard logging module, was written up by someone who wanted to port the logging API from Java.

Contrast that with (some) standards committees on which nomination and membership is already the occasion for political infighting and maneuvering.

JLV
Joke

Re: Brackets

I wasn't aware of it, but you can try it out already. Really. Just type this on the Python command line and proceed:

`from __future__ import braces`

If you're confused, Googling the code will get you to a Stackoverflow.

Like it? try `import this` too!

Do note the icon ;-) LOL

JLV

Re: Now seems like the perfect time...

Not opposed per se, but standardization is not a panacea. And I’d like to know what it would improve in practice.

Try getting ahold of the ANSI SQL standard for example. 180 Euro. Mind you, that price is a good way for rdbms vendors’ proprietary extensions and hacks to fly under the radar. But hardly very fitting to 2018s otherwise mostly free tooling and freeing up obstacles to participation by individual devs.

Also, there is a large degree of standardization happening in Python land already. C-Python, where the VM is C-based is the best known. That’s what is known as Python. but there are alternatives like Pypy, Juthon, Cython. Everyone seems to coexist fruitfully via... standards.

A podcast right after Guido’s departure indicates they’re more leaning towards a triumvirate or other small wise committee as a structure. Possibly even another Benevolent Dictator.

The Death of the Gods: Not scared of tech yet? You haven't been paying attention

JLV
Boffin

Re: Add this book to the pile

Here's a suggestion. Privilege electing politicians who have some level of acquaintance, be it slight, with telling the truth. There are gasp, even pols, who occasionally do that. The more they get rewarded for it, the less liars will get to power. Verify, then trust.

Any implied criticism of any serving politicians, or even recently resigned ones, is purely the fiction of your imagination.

Facebook flat-out 'lies' about how many people can see its ads – lawsuit

JLV

Re: The suit is without merit, says Facebook.

and multiple Tinder accounts from identical IPs. A good deal of which are conveniently 25 to 34.

Kids are more likely than adults to submit to peer pressure from robots

JLV

Re: and they say

so true. see slavery, the Holocaust and similars. you’d like to think you’d have more ethical yourself, but if all your peers said it was ok...

children? sure, but not like the adults are immune.

not negative on the human condition. but being part of the mob, left or right, is however always a risk to be aware of.

JLV
Headmaster

Either the word peer has a meaning that I didn't know of, or "peer pressure from robots" seems hard to achieve if the subjects under test are human children.

Aside from that quibble, interesting.

@Dave. Brilliant segue into the Brexit debate. Totally relevant. Esp, as "children aged from seven to nine years old" were obviously voting in a referendum 2 years ago.

Visual Studio gains some go-faster stripes for Android emulation

JLV

Re: IDEs, WTF?

This. At least for me.

At a guess, one of the problems needing solving is certain languages that require 1 file per class, often with nested directories. Minus an IDEs project drill down pane, navigating 100's of files might be a hassle.

My main beef with IDEs is how much screen space they take away from the code. I want to see as much as possible at one glance.

One interesting alternative to IntelliSense autocomplete, which, as a fast touch typist, I find aggravating is Sublime's autocompletion based on existing names in the current file. That won't catch all of an object's methods, but it will suggest constants, modules, etc... as long as they've already been used. Surprisingly helpful and very fast.

My favorite editor is still KEdit, which has support for IBM XEDIT mainframe editor's show/hide syntax.

show 'abc'; show 'xyz' will end up showing all lines with either abc or xyz. incredibly powerful to look at logfiles for example.

hide 'wxyz' will then remove those, but keep the others xyz.

c /xyz/foo/all will then operate only on what's still displayed, so wxyz will remain as is the rest will be foo.

Brilliant idea, too bad it's Windows-only and ASCII-only to boot which means I never get to use it.

P.S. ever had SQL Server Studio insisting on Intellisense-ing a db with 10000+ tables, with sloooow lookups on each table to helpfully suggest column names that you already know? Fun. Telling it to stop trying is less fun and less obvious. Almost like Google Location Services turn off in fact - you have to do in 2-3 different spots before IntelliSense's really gone.

Democrats go on the offensive over fake FCC net neut'y cyberattack

JLV

Maybe the whole sorry thing happened because they were using a 25 Mbps “broadband” pipe for comments hosting @ FCC? You know, eat-your-own-dogfood, slumming like the plebs ;-)

good balanced article though !

Oracle: Run, don't walk, to patch this critical Database takeover bug

JLV

is JavaVM what supports Java, not PLSQL, Stored Procedures, on the database engine?

Google keeps tracking you even when you specifically tell it not to: Maps, Search won't take no for an answer

JLV

Re: Stuff Like This Should Be Illegal

nah. as a journalist once wrote a true conspiracy theorist will know far more about one particular facet of the issue than you ever will. he’ll then use one supposed or factual discrepancy to shoot down any amount of scientific and historical evidence, no matter how much the overall ledger is stacked against his theory. and no matter how good your arguments are.

that journo was talking about cranks’ supposed issues with Zircon B chemistry. but you see the same with 9/11 and Tower 7 for example. they don’t have to explain away your evidence, you have to convince them their obsession is unwarranted, against their collective consciousness of thousands of other internet whackos.

true conspiracy nuts are not worth wasting the time of day on unless you have a compelling reason.

if they’re a friend, agree to disagree.

What do a meth, coke, molly, heroin stash and Vegas allegedly have in common? Broadcom cofounder Henry Nicolas

JLV

a sympathetic character...

until the California 3 strikes felony laws. yup, those that occasionally send pizza shoplifters for life.

a**hole

Japanese dark-web drug dealers are so polite, they'll offer 'a refund' if you're not satisfied

JLV

Re: Japanese Dark Web Prostitution?

>Wait... "Manual" sex?

A handjob, dear.

You really should go out more.

How evil JavaScript helps attackers tag possible victims – and gives away their intent

JLV
Trollface

Re: What if you don't allow JS at all?

>Javascript on the web is EVIL, NOT NECESSARY (use HTML5, CSS like a *REAL* developer), and RIFE with exploits, tracking, slurping, ad-targeting, yotta yotta.

Oh, face it, Bob, you're just sore because JS is case-sensitive...

Researcher found Homebrew GitHub token hidden in plain sight

JLV

Re: It's not that popular

oh, and I forgot:

huge respect to the homebrew team for being so transparent.

JLV

Re: It's not that popular

? porting / Linux on OS/2 ?

AFAIK macports is pretty damn native and so is whatever it installs. it’s name refers to ‘ports’, the utility on BSD that is tasked with installling packages, again very natively.

there is _nothing_ Linux-y about it, except that a package, say postgres’s, source code will be mostly the same as what it uses on Linux. most of these things have no GUI/X-Windows component whatsoever, so not a consideration either.

this is like telling someone never to use apt-get, yum or rpm on Linux. sure, if apt-get or the installed package is pwned, so are you, but that’s to be expected.

used at this level and on the terminal, a Mac is pretty much just like a Linux distribution, including access to a vast array of server/programmer/utility packages. only GUI stuff changes, but really there isn't much of that either - your code editor and browser likely is the same as the one you'd use on Linux.

JLV

Re: It's not that popular

Ah, good catch on /usr/local/bin ownership. My primary is macports (/opt/local/bin, owner's still root).

But once I had to install a Microsoft odbc package that only came with homebrew (and even then managed to have a really wonky install script), so now I am stuck with both (yes, that works). I guess next time I will be a bit more cautious before using homebrew. Txs, MS.

I think most of the times when developer blogs recommend a package installation procedure, they tend to suggest homebrew rather than macports, so I think it actually is more popular than macports. Debate about the pros and cons of both tend to remind me of editor wars, unlike your more valid criticism.

JLV

wow.

Had that been exploited, that’s about as nasty as it gets for Macs using FOSS (macports may want to check their stuff too).

Unintuitively, this is why I really don’t trust installing stuff from people’s random git/binaries/make self-hosted servers, source code or not: securing code delivery infrastructure is hard and a big target. If Homebrew, in that biz for years, can get it wrong, using normalized infrastructure, how likely are 100s of individual devs’ sites to be always right in their configs?

Wondering what to do with that $2,300 burning a hole in your pocket?

JLV

much wailing and gnashing @ https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/

imperial clothes have disappeared

gravity has reasserted itself

unicorns are not prancing over the rose colored clouds

the future is not quite here and it's even less lumped in this particular snake oil shop

asking $2300 takes some serious cojones

But, damn fine job on all the social media and promotioning, ML. Good looking models, groovy spectacles. That's what counts most, after all.

Good call, El Reg.

Those were the days: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicleap/comments/8ym04z/the_registers_latest_article_on_magic_leap_sinks/

Top Euro court: No, you can't steal images from other websites (too bad a school had to be sued to confirm this little fact)

JLV

Re: Prepare for...

>Well, I'm sure every school in the world will be able to afford to employ full time copyright compliance staff

Oh, bullshit. If you need to go beyond teaching needs exemptions, it's not hard to find replacements.

Google Image Search, License : Non commercial reuse, with modification.

https://www.google.com/search?q=cordoba+spain&tbm=isch&source=lnt&tbs=sur:fm&sa=X

If you don't like Google, you can probably use https://commons.wikimedia.org directly. Convenience is not an excuse to bypass others' rights.

Given the school context, it would have been nice to know if the photographer originally started out suing or if he did so after a takedown request was ignored.

Imagine Python fan fiction written in C, read with a Lisp: Code lingo Nim gets cash injection

JLV

Re: Why (after all, we already know everything)?

https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/2129/who-said-that-essentially-everything-in-theoretical-physics-had-already-been-dis

>It appears that the source of this anecdote is Max Planck himself. In a 1924 lecture, he told the story as follows:

>> When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly...he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science...Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but the system as a whole stood there fairly secured, and theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries.

JLV

Re: (untitled)

>PERL... readability of LISP

Hey!

with my dyslexic take on nested parenthesis and brackets I’d never thought I’d defend LISPs legibility

Seriously, and that counts for Ruby to a lesser extent: a general programming language is _not_ a shell and needs not adopt BASH’s very useful (in a shell) array of special symbols and variables.

Re nim casing I wonder if it’s motivated partially by JS/HTML naming considerations. Vue.js or example may have you define <foo-bar> tag in html, but the matching JS has to refer to it as FooBar. Still, seems ugly.

Re casing and “modern languages don’t need stinking case sensitivity”. They may not, but mangled up casing in source code will be a mess to read and unpleasant/less precise to grep/sed against.

New age discrim row: Accenture, Facebook sued by sales boss for favoring 'new blood'

JLV

For laughs/tears, try "Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble" by Dan Lyons (dude writing Fake Steve Jobs blog a while back).

Mind you, it has at least as much to do with stupidly mismanaged new-style IT companies as it does with ageism per se.

Sur-Pies! Google shocks world with sudden Android 9 Pixel push

JLV

>if you highlight the name of a restaurant, you'll be offered to search for Yelp reviews of the place.

Most of the time googling “<restaurant> yelp” used to get me the Google Reviews for it first, strangely enough.

Pleasant programming playground paves popular Python path

JLV
Trollface

>It doesn't implement advanced concepts like Lambda Expressions

Many snake worshipers also instinctively avoid the Lambda with a Thousand Young, spoken of by the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in his dreaded tome as an affront to linguistical purity. Unaussprechlichen Kulten also refers to its non-Euclidean capacity to achieve both powerlessness and obfuscation. The, now retired, BDFL is rumored to have wanted to sacrifice the errant and ungrateful child when summoning the third incarnation of the snake that shall eat the world.

Click this link and you can get The Register banned in China

JLV

Re: whatever’s wrong ...Xi does happen to be competent

>experience it yourself

Methink there is a massive difference between experiencing it as a foreigner, esp a Westerner, and as a local, specifically in the context of political freedom.

If you say the wrong thing, you’ll at worst be asked to leave and never granted a visa again.

Locals don’t “experience” it in the same way. Or, are you denying the existence of political-only prisoners in China?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_dissidents

Because all the rest really is bullshit - either a country has political prisoners or it doesn’t. That is orthogonal to other considerations like competence, excessive police force, excessive imprisonment of certain minorities. Not so much to corruption - political prisoners often end up there for decrying it.

True, the power to throw folk in jail does let you get away with a lot more too

Not only China - nice Thailand, which issues 20 yr sentences to middle aged women liking a FB post making fun of the royal dog is right up there.

So, your “all the same”? Calling BS.

JLV

whatever’s wrong ...

with our political systems here*, there’s plenty worse around elsewhere. Or at least you’re mostly allowed to criticize your local Dear Leader. Much as some of them think of the press as enemies.

Xi does happen to be competent, but dictatorships don’t always get competent bosses, not unlike the problems bequeathed by Wilhelm II or Leopold II.

I truly wonder if Xi doesn’t realize how ridiculous and Barbara Streisandy the Winnie censorship makes him look.

* for various flavors of ‘here’ as exemplified by May, Trump, Tsipras...

Game over for Google: Fortnite snubs Play Store, keeps its 30%, sparks security fears

JLV

Re: No brainer

To be fair, IIRC back in Nokia store days, a 30% cut would have been a big improvement - it was more like 40-50%.

I get Epic’s motivation but the security effects might indeed end up painful for users.

Then, again, that last may not be entirely to Google’s disadvantage. Better that than caving to <30%, for them.

Interesting play against the app store semi-monopolies. Popcorn.

Boffins build a NAZI AI – wait, let's check that... OK, it's a grammar nazi

JLV

You’re assumption may need correcting and their is an example:

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25comma.html

'Unhackable' Bitfi crypto-currency wallet maker will be shocked to find fingernails exist

JLV

>McAfee – a man who makes Donald Trump's tweeting compulsion look considered and thoughtful

Less stable(maybe, one hopes), more genius (at least at some point). More fun to be around, I’d bet and at least he can blame mind altering substances for most of his tweets.

Make Facebook, Twitter, Google et al liable for daft garbage netizens post online – US Senator

JLV

Re: It's the easy way out...

>What signal does that sent out exactly?

Specifically re selling alcohol to minors (and not falling in the trap of generalizing to the subject of this article) it sends a rather salutory message:

those who would have financial incentives to sell to minors are discouraged, financially, from doing so. While it would be pointless, costly to pursue the minors doing so, who being minors and committing minor offences in this case, would generally be beyond serious punishments.

Most countries in the West have similar systems because it is simple, cost-effective and targets a small set of intermediaries.

What would _you_ suggest? Juvenile prison, fines to the parents? Iran would do caning, but I won’t even suggest you’d suggest it.

While I have my doubts re this bill, your comparison with liquor regulations is rather weak.

HPE supercomputer is still crunching numbers in space after 340 days

JLV

Re: "SSDs fail at an alarming rate in space"

>I don't even have time to light a cigarette.

Yeah, but with all the anti-smoking regs nowadays, a cig is quite the production (cf the IT Crowd. No, I'm not a smoker, but the hoops nowadays...)

I wonder if SSD wear isn't partly accelerated by constant swap writes eating up their write cycle allowances. Updated my laptop from 8 to 16 GB RAM for just that reason after my Samsung 850 died without warning after 2 years. Also made a very small (200MB) Ram disk to write transient files like test logs, faster too.

Facebook's React Native web tech not loved by native mobile devs

JLV

Re: Facebook?

I don’t pretend to be all that good at JS. I did persevere quite a while doing some semicomplex UI code with plain JS + jquery + Bootstrap. An app, basically, with dropdown menus, pick lists etc that then forwards requests to a Django server that is the real brain. Most actions mean page refreshes, not in-page AJAX. Not an SPA. No module loading, except via require.js.

It’s bloody painful, hard to test, extremely unproductive and buggy. Switching to Vue + Webpack/JS6 (but could have been something else) was a massive improvement. Cypress.io on the testing side: much better than Selenium.

Yes, JS frameworks and tooling are a frustratingly fragmented and moving target. And, JS, IMHO, has too many flaws to be a great choice of backend language any time soon. But, if on the web UI side and past a minimal level of complexity, let's not fall into the trap of romanticizing plain JS without build tools (to handle JS6/modules).

It's not like old-schooling C or assembler, much more like hanging on to VB6. YMMV.

JLV

Re: Over the air updates

Here's a little write up about that.

https://codeburst.io/react-native-vs-real-native-apps-ad890986f1f?gi=1a0b1f869757

JLV
Coat

Re: Facebook?

Assuming that you want to code in JS, and that you want to use a GUI framework to do so, React is one of the more mature ones and has a a sizeable developer following. FB is the originator, and that's about as far as that goes.

React's open source, anyone can scan the libs for mothership calls - it's not hosted. FB (which I don't use), for all its sins, has issued some interesting stuff like this, GraphQL and the Open Compute Project.

Personally, I don't care much for React because it's based on mashing HTML into JS using something called JSX, which makes my eyes bleed. Talk about ignoring what decades of software experience has taught us about separation of concerns ;-) I wonder if that's not what turned off those native devs.

This is JS/JSX file, with HTML lovingly embedded into JS:

return React.createElement('div', {className: 'shopping-list'},

React.createElement('h1', /* ... h1 children ... */),

React.createElement('ul', /* ... ul children ... */)

);

Other choices include:

- Angular, from Google, another noted privacy activist. But Angular 2 pretty much threw away all compatibility from A1, making it a bit hard to trust. And it's also quite complex.

- Vue.js, which I prefer myself. Originated by one main dev and without a major corporate sponsor (heavily used by Alibaba however). It's a pretty clever library, simple and a lot less enterprise-y than Angular or React. At feature parity, or near-parity at least for some use cases, simplicity has a quality all its own, IMHO. Vue's native support is a bit weak, from what I understand.

- and a bunch of other contenders like Ember, Backbone, Stimulus, etc... (I agree with @Simon's framework a week quip).

And, yes, in advance, I deeply apologize to all those that feel that coding in JS, even for web pages, is the work of Satan, the root of all evil, kills puppies and is directly causing global warming.

My coat.

Core blimey! Apple macOS update lifts boot from MacBook Pro neck

JLV

Re: They missed that one bit of code...

Maybe you could point said “someone” to a performant _current_ MacOS desktop?

Sad to see Apple pretty much desert the dev/power user market, these latest MBPs lack in upgradeability and onboard storage. And at what’s getting to be pretty insane price points, way worse than 5-6 years ago.

Lots of devs use macs, but I wonder if that’s going to continue at this rate.

But they do look glitzy in ads.

If Brussels wants Android forks, phone makers aren't helping

JLV
Headmaster

Re: And the mess that is Android updating

If you'll mouse over the icon, you'll see it says "Pedantic grammar nazi alert"...

FWIW, Mel Brooks, who's Jewish, seemed to think that making fun of Nazis was one way to de-fang their evil ideology.

>Brooks: Yes, absolutely. Of course it is impossible to take revenge for 6 million murdered Jews. But by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths.

While I understand your sentiment, I also tend to agree with Mel. See also Chaplin's Great Dictator.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/spiegel-interview-with-mel-brooks-with-comedy-we-can-rob-hitler-of-his-posthumous-power-a-406268.html

(Interestingly, Brooks hated Begnini's `Life Is Beautiful`, for the same reasons as me.)

JLV

Re: And the mess that is Android updating

>without actually explaining it......

If you're genuinely curious, try posting the specifics of what irks you @ https://english.stackexchange.com/

A simple "is this correct?" should give you some good insights.

JLV

Re: And the mess that is Android updating

Oh, parmi nous, il y en a qui parlent deja mal leur propre langue ET aiment corriger les autres sans bonne raison.

Can AC actually enlighten us as to what he was whining about originally? Because, to me he looks like both a pedant and not really good at English.

Is it the position of the _is_ below?

>And the mess that is Android updating

That may be a bit strange-looking, but it's correct grammar and perfectly suitable to the task.

BTW, I rather liked this write-up about what Google is up to. I hadn't realized it was quite that nasty, esp the bit about basically cutting off manufacturers who make _any_ Android fork devices.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/

♫ The Core i9 clock cycles go up. Who cares where they come down?

JLV

Re: unless I am wrong

Ah, I stand corrected. I think the story I read @ Ars about this indicated that 256->512GB meant going i7->i9 and I didn't check. I had seen the 3100->3700$ bump before to get to 512, saw that the only thing that changed there was the CPU and assumed that $600 would mean a lot beefier CPU.

I wonder if I should be relieved it's only a greedy Apple move, without being into greedy and incompetent.

Almost $4K to get a laptop with 512GB? Linux on my next work laptop is looking likelier by the day.

IMHO, this is a really worrying incident about how much say the engineers have @ Apple if a flaw as obvious as this makes it to market.

JLV

Re: unless I am wrong

you’re a right genius, aintcha?

i thought about saying we were getting high prices and, at best, reasonable hardware (if you’re not often @ sustained peak CPU loading in your use that it)

but then I thought charitably that it’s obvious in context.

not to you i guess.

can type slower if it helps...

JLV

Re: unless I am wrong

>You can’t afford the Apple tax.

I can make do with either of the 2 choices below:

- high price/flawless hardware.

- reasonable price/reasonable hardware

JLV

unless I am wrong

This CPU is the one that you have to get on a 512GB or up SSD MBP. For... $600 CAD extra to the 256/lower CPU model. That’s mucho $$$$ for 256G of disk, but hey, you get a faster CPU. Oh, wait.

So, if you want a “pro” machine without a thermally crippled CPU, that’s 256GB disk space max, bub!

Least Apple should do is revisit their SKUs and ship reasonably sized disks with CPUs that run normally within their TDP budget.

Microsoft still longs to be a 'lifestyle' brand, but the cupboard looks bare

JLV

isn’t there a risk?

As author said, pure B2B seems risky. If MS surrenders desk/laptop OSs to Apple, that leaves it open to corporate users not caring much for Windows on their desktops.

That gone, Linux servers on the backend seems less of a stretch.

This could really snowball over time, esp with new companies.

They’ve already fecklessly dropped mobile, which is a kinda natural counterpart to fatter clouds.

But, hey, hadda scrape up the 26B$ for LinkedIn. Not to mention the 7.5 for Github. Which, even if you tend to be cautiously charitable about them rescuing a money-losing biz, is still a lot, for a money-losing biz.

Fork it! Google fined €4.34bn over Android, has 90 days to behave

JLV

Re: > "And Google technology is far more pervasive than Microsoft's ever was."

>99% of white colour workers

Darn. Maybe it’s time to find some skin darkener, reverse of Eddie Murphy’s SNL bus sketch.

MS was a monopoly back in the 90s. But it’s hard to argue that they are that dominant nowadays. Win8 and 10 are not that hot, they exited mobile. The perception is hardly “all MS, all the time”. Businesses could switch. Calling a monopoly is always hard, but MS in ‘18 is less powerful than MS in ‘98.

I find this article attracts a lot of “what about X” distractions, rather than

reasoned rebuttal of the EU’s findings.

Python creator Guido van Rossum sys.exit()s as language overlord

JLV

Re: 'programming styles from different languages are (to a varying extent) supported'

things it doesn't do (I've probably missed some):

- compile time checks - there are some basic syntax checks (dangling commas, bad indents, etc...), but nothing like a real compiler. It is an interpreted language, albeit a strongly typed one. Even the 3.x type annotations are more intended for 3rd party library parsing than real compile time type checking. That's a hard separation - you either want compile checks or you don't.

- information hiding and encapsulation. There is no privacy as such to class and module attributes, though single underscore, _my_somewhat_private, by convention means non-public and double underscores, __my_almost_private, are obfuscated, but still accessible.

- full-on threading. There's something called the Global Interpreter Lock in the main (C-based) version of the language that enforces code locks. It looks like full threading from the POV of the coder, but code blocks will take their turn in some cases. Different ways exist to mitigate, and it looks fine from the dev's POV, but it's still there.

- speed. You can find cases of quick Python programs that compare fairly favorably to C alternatives, but that's just because the algos are not CPU-bound. Or they are, but the heavy lifting could be left to objects which are implemented in C. For example, the built-in hash maps are very clever and can often make a huge difference in speed, but they're C-based, not native Python. Ditto things like pandas or numpy, used in data science - libs are all in C, but dev need not care. Generally, Python knows full well that it can't do everything quickly and goes out of its way to facilitate interfacing to native compiled code.

Pure Python CPU-bound code? Slow. Writing a driver in Python? Not a great idea.

- it's not manual memory management. Which means you may experience the joys of garbage collection kicking in at inopportune moments.

JLV

Re: 'programming styles from different languages are (to a varying extent) supported'

Different paradigms, rather than languages:

Functional - the list comprehensions and iterators, maps, reduces, lambdas, all sorts of goodies (which I know little about).

Object Oriented - pretty much everything is an object, including classes themselves and functions/methods. There's a lot of depth in the data model that few people use. For examples, classes are themselves objects with their class being a metaclass. That's useful, for some use cases, or for some people's programming preferences - I have a bit of a blind spot for them, they're an unused tool in my case. You can generate classes on the fly as well - say a class for each database table you are reading from.

(one thing to beware of : mutable objects as attributes, at a class level or as default arguments, bites everyone sooner or later. self._list = [] looks like cls._list = [], but in the first case appending stuff self._list.append(hit) affects your instance, in the second all that class's instances.)

Procedural - if you want to do write something with a main calling all sorts of functions, there's really nothing forcing you to use classes or objects as your building blocks - sticking to functions is perfectly permitted. ditto avoiding list comprehensions.

Multiplatform/scripting - rare is the case where you really have do worry about Windows vs Nix. os.path.join("foo","bar","zoom") will do the right thing on either, barring issues with Windows C:/D: drive names.

Since functions are objects, you can say assign any attribute, say a template to a function. The reasons why you might to do this are not common, but it can be helpful at times. For example, I explicitly assign template file paths to webserver functions because it allows you to automatically introspect which urls use which templates.

def f_view(**kwds):

(indent) print (f_view.template % kwds)

f_view.template = "my foo is: %(foo)s"

f_view(foo=2, bar="1")

All these tricks need to be sanity-checked against clarity - it is just as possible to write incomprehensible code in Python as in C!