It’s generally a bad and dangerous idea, especially for someone who is schizophrenic, but antipsychotics can have very serious side effects, and I think it’s painting with a brush that’s a bit too broad to suggest that someone would only stop taking them for “some psychotic reason”. People who take these medications are often facing some very difficult trade offs.
People misunderstand this stuff in part because of the failure to make a distinction between a theory (which is often a mathematical description of a system, though this depends on the discipline) and an interpretation (which really is an idea in someone’s head, though often one we have good reason to believe). Scientists mostly work with the former day-to-day, but the general public is mostly interested in the latter.
Usually this distinction isn’t really a big deal, but in some cases - quantum mechanics, for example - there’s a big difference between the two, with multiple interesting interpretations to consider.
When we don’t make this distinction it creates an opening for people with poor understanding (or, occasionally, bad motives) to nitpick extremely well-established theories on the basis of quibbling about interpretation. I worry about this with respect to climate change specifically: deniers come up with a million reasons that climate change may be partially natural, or that this or that industry may be unfairly maligned, but we can’t get sucked into those debates so much that we forget the big picture painted by the data and models we have.
I’d argue that you have to get pretty deep into experimental GHC language extensions to get into anything as weird as some of the SFINAE-based template metaprogramming tricks I’ve seen (and used, sadly) in C++.
It’s probably hard to see it this way when you’re starting out (and you may need a certain personality type as well =) but for me, programming in Haskell is a genuine pleasure because it’s so easy to express yourself in it. Things that require a huge amount of code in other languages are effortless and elegant in Haskell, and the compiler is extremely effective at finding mistakes in your code and often even your design, so you start treating it as a partner that helps you write your program. The experience always puts a smile on my face. YMMV, of course.
I do suspect that in the near term Idris may overtake Haskell as my favorite language to program in, though. I haven’t had a chance to sit down and learn it yet, but everything I’ve read about it so far has left me very excited.
I'd argue you're conflating simple with easy; the code might be simple, but I'd wager given the inability of Haskell'ers to even explain what a monad is successfully, that few would find it easy.
I'm a bit surprised that so many commenters here are reacting to the second paragraph as if it described an extreme lifestyle that would inevitably lead to ruin, or as if you need to make a choice between having these kinds of experiences and being a successful, fulfilled adult later in life. Neither of those things are true.
Here's what I believe the parent post is saying, but stated differently: try all the things that life has to offer, and get outside your comfort zone. Let yourself make mistakes. Explore. Try to connect with many different kinds of people, especially people who aren't like you. Push the boundaries a little. When you find something you're passionate about, dive in, but be sure to come up for air regularly and enjoy the simple pleasures of life.
Don't let the anxieties or negativity of others stop you. If you do those things, I promise you you won't regret it.
I will say this for C++: post C++11, it’s one of the few languages in widespread use to have an explicitly defined memory model. The people working on C++ definitely do care about concurrency and parallelism. I’d still choose Rust over C++ for that kind of program any time I was given the choice, though. =)
Absolutely, I'm not saying they don't care; it's that solving that problem is an explicit non-goal of the GSL work. The C++ committee is clearly working on concurrency related things, I was reading the various coroutines TSes recently in fact, as we're working on similar things in Rust.
That's not accurate. I keep my iPhones for two years, and when I upgrade I give them to family members who have always gotten another 2-3 years of use out of them. (And Apple has continued to support them during that time with software updates.)
It's actually one of the main things that keeps me in the iPhone ecosystem.
There are options other than "tough laws" for helping communities struggling with high rates of addiction.
Your breakdown of this situation makes it sound like you think it doesn't matter what you do, because someone will call you a racist no matter what. In other words, that accusations of racism are totally arbitrary. That's not true.
An even better question is "faster by what metric?". Once it has been running for a while and the JIT has done its work, it can definitely happen that a Java program will outperform an equivalent C++ program because of the JIT's improved knowledge of the whole program and the dynamic execution environment. C++ can gain much of the same benefit with LTO and PGO, but it's definitely not trivial (particularly PGO) and there's not really a slam dunk win for C++.
Now if the metric is startup time, that's a different story. (Though I believe there's been a lot of work on hybrid AOT/JIT since I left the world of managed languages, so maybe things are better now.)
Can you clarify what makes you say that the EPA is "so large that it is no longer effective"? Everything I've heard about the situation inside the EPA makes it sound more like they're desperately short on staff and funding and they're doing the best that they can within those limitations. The problem isn't lack of focus; it's lack of resources.
It's not as if the EPA has been growing unchecked; conservative politicians have been doing their best to gut its funding or render it toothless for decades now, going back at least as far as Reagan. If you're not happy with the current situation, it seems unlikely that continuing down the path of defunding the EPA will improve it.
