madia_leva
It helps, of course, that they don't have domestic internet mammoths putting money in their pockets to get away with whatever they want (USA) or a state sponsored big brother / AI yoke programme that depends on data being collected from all around the world (China _and_ USA).
If anything, the EU is trying to prevent external (and increasingly hostile) powers to use EU citizens data for gain or plain aggression (Cambridge Analytica & Brexit, for example).
If you have a much improved design which allows for a better implementation then it would be perfectly fine if you reimplement the old API on top of the new API. As long as this is strictly transparent (source and binary, if this makes sense), then why not.
Linus attitude about not breaking user space is the correct one.
We are talking about an API, not a shared service.
Backwards compatibility is better than any other option. From time to time you need to provide new, clean versions of old APIs and that's it. Things get deprecated (as in "best not to use this unless you are aware of the consequences". Aggregate over time, don't replace. Garbage collect when not reachable. This works for APIs as weel as for functional programming data structures.
Clojure(script) approach is a good example of how this can work beautifully well in practice. Java also used to be reasonably good in this regard. Javascript (the language) is good. Javascript (the ecosystem) is criminally bad.
The issue is that the fact they decided to impose a single language to all the country is another example of the nationalism I was talking about. Deciding to erradicate existing languages and cultures for nationalistic reasons. That is cultural genocide. It's not unlikely of what Chinese are doing.
You can contrast this with the case of Switzerland or India where you see you can have a strong cohesion and feeling of belonging to the cpuntry without needing to erradicate significant parts of your own culture.
What really happens is that in the 15 last years English has gained space foot in the EU institutions, to the point that they are quickly becoming just English speaking. You have a service which used to homd all meetings in English, a new Croatian, Hungarian or Polish staff member who doesn't speak French arrives and suddenly all the meetings and mass emails are written in English. The opposite doesn't really happen.
After the start of the pandemic French suddenly lost almost all space in meetings with Member States representatives or just multiple services present. They have become English onlycause there is no interpretation anymore and many people can't speak or even understand French. Many people that chose to speak French in meetings (mostly as a matter of principle) now speak English. The change in the last year was huge. French just want to go back to the previous status quo.
This is the reason the only Spanish language which is an official EU language is Castillian. The other three (Galician, Catalan and Basque) are not EU official languages. Same happens to many other languages spoken in Europe.
In every country children are told quite silly things about the world and, in particular, about the importance of their country in the world. This is even worse for current or former empires (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Russia, US, China...).
Children there are told they are special and superior in some way to other children who were born in other places. It's not surpising that they end up asuming those lies as something obvious and natural. The most striking example nowdays is of course the United States, just because they are the biggest superpower (China's children are not less indoctrinated, though). Most American adults believe that their country is the biggest democracy the world has ever seen (cough, cough, India), their lifestyle the highest (Scandinavia smiles amusingly with a barely hidden condescending gesture) or that their wars are fought just to defend freedom (and Irak invaded because of the mass destruction weapons, apparently).
In the case of France they take as reference the Napoleonic times where their country was dominant and their language the vehicule of culture and politics in Europe. They also think the French Revolution invented real democracy or something similar (even though American Revolution started more than ten years earlier and Greeks had true democracies a couple thousand years before that).
Of course, those days are long gone, but this is what French are tought since they are small children, so most of them end up believing it.
Nationalism is a serious disease and most countries are infected.
Now more seriously, I think what the French are trying to do is just to avoid a complete switch to English in the EU institutions. Since the start of the pandemic, most meetings which used to be multilingual (with interpretation) are now English only and nobody seems to have a big problem with that. If anything, it makes interactions more natural (talking through interpreters is a pain in the ass). French are probably worried that this could be here to stay and are just trying to go back to the status quo.
I think it's just a cultural thing. When it comes to level of histrionism, Americans are on one extreme of the spectrum while some Asian cultures are on the opposite one. Sundar seems to me to be in the exact sweet spot.
Not that there is anything wrong with lambdas, but it's quite a los of boilerplate for something as simole as a cond.
It took me a long time to become productive in Clojure. There were simply too many things to learn at once, from syntax, to tools, to, more important, change of paradigm. I did the mistake to also learn Emacs at the same time (love it, but it just took too much time that I didn't have).
I know feel very productive because everything is done in the same way and those dozens of functions you mention is all I have to use 95% of the time. It takes time to learn them and even more to become proficient, but once you are there everything is very simple and fast.
There are two misconceptions that took me way too much time to realize:
- Macros are unfortunately needed sometimes, but they should be avoided as much as possible. DSLs are better done with data structures. - REPL driven development is messy and stateful (you keep modifying vars all the time). A test driven development is much better. Having the REPL is still valid and all what you need most of the time for simple things, though.
Clojure can be very productive, but it requires significant (in my particular case, very significant) investment to get there. In the process, I learnt a lot about FP and, more importantly, about how to model almost anything as immutable data. Once this clicked on me, working in languages without this support for easy manipulation of immutable data structures looks like going backwards.
People living on an area with rivers and wild animals could do a bit better. Unless they are at reach of people walking out of the cities.
Think about a zombie apocalypse, but with starving people by the hundreds of thousands. Starving and, if in the US, armed.
Keeping food and water at home for at least for a couple of months is a very sensitive thing to do for this kind of events. Think about a new pandemic but this time the virus has 10% or 20% of mortality. Exactly.
There is a fantastic book called "The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing" by Martin D. Davis that makes a very good job of explaining the context of Gödel's theorem, the theorem itself and the relation with computing in an accesible way. I'd recommend it to anyone interested either in computers or in Gödel's theorem.
The most difficult part of dedicating all your efforts to one objective is to accept that you are giving up on all the other things you might achieve.
Worse, you need to accept that most people that did that and pursued one single thing were not successful and they simply sacrificed everything else.
The few that succeeded are the ones we know about. We think they chose the right strategy in life, while the truth is that they took the wrong strategy and were very simply lucky.
Taking advice from those people is lime taking advice from wingsuit flyers: not something that smart people should do.