I love systems programming language and have worked on the Ada language for a long time. I find Zig to be incredibly underwhelming. Absolutely nothing about it is new or novel, the closest being comptime which is not actually new.
Also highly subjective but the syntax hurts my eyes.
So I’m kind of interested by an answer to the question this articles fails to answer. Why do you guys find Zig so cool ?
It’s hard to do something that is truly novel these days. Though I’d argue that Zigs upcoming approach to Async IO is indeed novel on its own. I haven’t seen anything like it in an imperative language.
What’s important is the integration of various ideas, and the nuances of their implementation. Walter Bright brings up D comptime in every Zig post. I’ve used D. Yet I find Zigs comptime to be more useful and innovative in its implementation details. It’s conceptually simpler yet - to me - better.
You mention Ada. I’ve only dabbled with it, so correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t have anything as powerful as Zigs comptime? I think people get excited about not just the ideas themselves, but the combination and integration of the ideas.
In the end I think it’s also subjective. A lot of people like the syntax and combination of features that Zig provides. I can’t point to one singular thing that makes me excited about Zig
Scala did async io in a very similar way over a decade ago except it was far more ergonomic, in my opinion, because the IO object was implicit. I am not convinced by either scala or zig that it is the best approach.
As someone who still thinks one should write C (so as a completely uncool person), what I like about Zig is that it is no-nonsense language that just makes everything work as it is supposed to be without unnecessary complications,
D is similar, except that it fell into the trap of adding to many features.
So, no, I do not really see anything fundamentally new either. But to me this is the appealing part. Syntax is ok (at least compared to Rust or C++).
Having said this, I am still skeptical about comptime for various reasons.
Came here to say that. It’s important to remember how biased hacker news is in that regard. I’m just out of ten years in the safety critical market, and I can assure you that our clients are still a long way from being able to use those. I myself work in low level/runtime/compilers, and the output from AIs is often too erratic to be useful
Documentation search I might agree, but that wasn’t really the context, I think. Code reviews is hit and miss, but maybe doesn’t hurt too much. They aren’t better at writing good tests than at writing good code in the first place.
are there any downsides to adding "bad tests" though? as long as you keep generated tests separate, it's basically free regression testing, and if something meaningfully breaks on a refactor, you can promote it to not-actually-slop
I would say that the average Hacker News user is negatively biased against LLMs and does not use coding agents to their benefit. At least what I can tell from the highly upvoted articles and comments.
SPARK allows you to formally prove that your code is correct according to a given specification. It can thus provides much stronger guarantees than what Rust would be able to provide.
> Yes, and security has a large performance impact.
Not necessarily. The linked blog talks about SPARK which is about running your code through theorem provers to mathematically formally verify that your code does the correct thing _in all instances_.
Once you have passed this level of verification - you can disable assertions and checks in the release version of the application (whilst of course - having the option of keeping them enabled in development releases).
>Just look at the performance costs of bounds-checking array access in C++ code.
If your compiler can prove you dont need bounds-checking it will remove the check and the performance would be the same. Hence, if your program has been proven to have no runtime errors you dont need them.
> Wouldn’t the performance costs of bounds checking on arrays be the same if the computer was doing it or if your code was doing it?
It depends. The C programmer can choose to do the bounds checking in a for loop by just checking once before the loop begins, or once per iteration even if an array is accessed multiple times in the loop, or the safe language might have more overhead than a simple if statement in the C code. This can, of course, go the opposite direction (the safe language has verified the loop bounds, but the C programmer is checking before every array access). It's a battle between the C programmer and the designer and/or implementer of the safe language.
One of the reasons I like C is it gives you more control. This can be a good or a bad thing. This can lead to some really performant code you couldn't do in most languages or it can lead to some gnarly security problems. Maybe both in the same spot of code.
I use C to write mostly pet projects at home. I use it at work without having a choice in the matter.
Not defending Russia in general, or in particular russian government. As a French person whose national medias are completely taken over by multinationals (source https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/PPA), not only the ban was a bit laughable in terms of banning propaganda, but also RT France's perspective and journalism was refreshing. It was presenting a skewed version of the world, but if you believe as I do that we won't attain information via objectivity, which is a nebulous concept anyway, but via plurality, RT France's disappearance is a net loss for the French media landscape, and I'm a bit alarmed at the black&whiteness of views I see here and in other places.
>if you believe as I do that we won't attain information via objectivity, which is a nebulous concept anyway, but via plurality, RT France's disappearance is a net loss for the French media landscape
I urge you to reconsider this philosophical standpoint, as it fails under adversarial conditions. It is possible for me to distort your view of the world - make it less accurate - even while telling you only true things. Selective truth can convey negative information. I merely need to have an idea of your pre-existing beliefs, and only correct some of them. If your terminal value is letting people be better informed, as defined by allowing them to make better predictions about the world, then permitting state propaganda outlets to tinker with their minds is a net loss.
Note that the Russian state does not share your viewpoint about free information flow. Can you really consider RT to be a good-faith participant in the public dialogue? If you're looking for a "fair" principle behind banning RT, I would argue that that is a good one - if you censor media, expect your media to be censored likewise.
Adding 5 propaganda sources to 1 actual new source doesn't improve anything it dilutes it. Plurality in that case only makes things worse. RT and Sputnik are garbage, they weren't great before but they're absolute garbage, rivaling "Infowars" in the USA. However, I think banning RT is bad as well and encourages politicians to ban other news sources that are reliable but opinionated.
To play devil’s advocate, if you could share the name of any actual news sources you deem credible and then give me a minimum number of objectively verifiable examples of incorrect or misinformation you would need to see from them in order to discredit them as an actual news source, I would gladly take up the challenge. Genuine offer.
My point is not to claim that disreputable sources should be treated as legitimate news. Instead it is to point out that some of the most credible news media have been caught spreading fake news to manipulate public opinion when it was politically convenient.
Historically this has happened most often in the run up to or the early stages of war.
“In a time of war the first casualty is the truth” - some guy on the Internet
> For verification in general, is the expense of verification in this case because of the model needed to verify Ada? For instance, perhaps a language that makes different choices might have a model checker that could scale better.
I don't think so. The SPARK subset has been chosen to aid verification. The problem of proof is inherently computationally hard, and the most gains you can expect will come from advances in solver technology, both algorithmic and in terms of scaling to multiple cores or GPU eventually.
Just my opinion :) But I work at AdaCore (not on SPARK) so have some familiarity with the subject.
I'm used to the conversation in here being extremely US-centric, but realize that this is much less true for European cities with good public transportation. I haven't ever used a car to go to work in my life.
I'm also very concerned about this better world where people stay home to save the planet. The common level of social interactions in the modern world is already low enough in my opinion.
EDIT: It rarely happens this way but in retrospect I feel my comment is way too tame. You think your problem is going to work. The problem is the whole american lifestyle where you live in an individual house and need a car to do anything, your house is an ecological disaster in terms of how much energy you need to keep it warm/cold, and even bringing food to your house will incur a large carbon footprint.
I know the system is hard to changes, but some people need to see the bigger picture, even if you can't do anything about it yet.
In the case of the USA, people staying home to work might have a positive impact on social interaction in the long run.
I'm pretty sure a large part of the reason why Americans are so lonely compared to the rest of the world is that the suburban bedroom community model physically divides us and makes it much more difficult to get to know one's neighbors. By the time you get home from work at 6:30 in the evening, it's time to cook dinner, and, once you're done cleaning up, there's not much time for anything aside from watching a bit of TV before you go to bed.
And then the weekend rolls around, and your time is dominated by catching up on all the housework and errands you didn't have time to do during the week because of your long commute. So you're not really getting to know your neighbors then, either.
Interesting. I'm symmetrically not used to think about those problems from an american perspective. Thanks for the insight.
I can indeed see a world where working from home might in the short term infuse some life in local life, from neighbors to associations etc.. So maybe it's actually a positive change!
I know that in my city, some restaurants closed in the downtown core but out in the population centers new restaurants open, a few friends in the business said revenue went up mostly in lunch service and afternoon happy hour time frame. That's after having 50% less tables because inside dining was closed.
The shift from doing lunch with your coworkers to doing lunch around your neighbors seems really positive to me.
It's definitely true for me. Working from home, I see my neighbors before work, during lunch, and after work much more than when they were going to the office. Especially, during lunch time, I see a lot more people that actually live near me out and about instead of people that happen to work in my general area that I'd typically never see after work or on the weekend since they'd go back to their own neighborhoods.
I'm old, I don't really make friends with work people. I seem to be in the minority now and maybe that's because everyone I work with moved here as soon as they were done with school.
It's really strange and I sometimes feel like an outsider. But everyone's going on hikes on the weekend and going to movies together. I'm not going back into the office at this point and one thing that appeals to me about remote distributed work is that it's separate from the rest of my life. When I walk away from my laptop, it's just gone.
Interesting, the opposite has been my experience, friends keep talking about how they can now move farther out of town and not have to deal with neighbours anymore. I'm considering similar.
Ultimately, people are more of a pain to deal with than a pleasure until you really get to know them. I suspect this is the same reason suburbs seem to be more appealing and costly than condos.
I see a lot of "this is a US-only problem" comments here lately on many topics and I just don't get it because it's usually just not remotely correct at all, nevermind relevant if most of the discussion IS based in the US, like for a US-based company. I lived in 3 different countries growing up, mostly with far more European influence than the US has now, and never at any time did most people I saw live in anything but individual houses that needed to be heated in the winter, and never at any time did my Dad not spend 1-2 hours commuting in a car every day. Yesterday someone was claiming MTV was a US-only thing. Sure, it's not universal, but claiming that it's US-only says more about their world view than any American IMO.
But aside from that, when I started being remote my social interactions went way up in terms of quantity and quality. I was free to choose where I lived, had lower cost of living, and had more time and less stress and other factors that would put me in a bad mood. Consequently, I spent more time with extended family members on both sides of my family. I played more with my children. I picked up healthier hobbies, including one where I train with a team at the gym. My social circle is far more diverse, more distinct from work. As others have experienced during COVID: I got to know my neighbors better, and we look out for each other. Having your social interaction primarily at work is very far from ideal, and in my experience and from many anecdotes here, cutting down the work interaction helps most others.
much less true for European cities with good public transportation.
I live in a "European city with good public transportation" and looking out my living room window I can see the main motorway into town, and it is bumper to bumper to traffic every single morning and evening. So obviously someone here is using their cars to get to and from work.
I'm a big fan of mass transit. I live in the US, but traveled regularly to Tokyo for over 20 years. Their mass transit system is awesome.
The social interaction thing is a big deal, but I don't think remote work will be the coffin nail, there. In fact, it could improve social interactions between neighbors.
There's a school of thought, that the air conditioner has been the true bane of social interaction, as everyone used to hang outside, and now, they don't.
That said, a whole lot of places are gonna have to get used to using air conditioners, and that won't be good for the environment.
I remember being in a town in Northern Germany, when a summer heat wave hit. It was awful. No one had air conditioning, and there were no fans to be found, in any stores.
In Germany we used to have unbearably hot weather for maybe a week a year. You just suffered through it, coping with going to the swimming pool or going to the ice cream parlour. All very social activities.
Now we are slowly getting used to the new reality of hot weather for weeks or months each year, and getting air conditioning is something many people think about (but most still put off because electricity is expensive).
I think in general warm weather is conductive to social activities (just look at Southern Italy vs Norway, or basically any place in Northern Europe vs any place in Southern Europe), but air conditioning drives people to just stay at home. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
IMHO it’s a policy failure (for climate, economics, and equality) to make electricity so expensive people are less likely to electrify things like their car and heating.
The ratio of gasoline to electricity price in Germany is slightly smaller than that in the US, so the incentive to electrify is proportionally smaller. This is bad. We shouldn’t be paying for renewable energy subsidies via consumer electricity prices; the US does this right by funding it from the general budget instead, which encourages electrification.
The European vision of living in dense, walkable neighborhoods, with easy access to quality amenities without the need to drive makes sense, to me at least, as the answer to this problem.
I'm not advocating for staying home; I'm advocating for less driving. It may not make as much of a difference in the E.U., but if we're aiming to be carbon neutral, less driving will be necessary, or, at least, extremely helpful in achieving that goal.
"The European vision of living in dense, walkable neighborhoods, with easy access to quality amenities without the need to drive makes sense, to me at least, as the answer to this problem."
What vision? People in Europe drive cars. The cars are smaller and things are less sprawled out than in the US, but people still drive. Europe is not just central London or Barcelona.
Ok! Sorry about the violent agreement message then. Yes, there is definitely a balance to be found between individual freedom and collective well being here.
I guess what I'm getting at is that if people drive less, they'll realize that their car-centered lifestyles don't work anymore, and will have to find alternatives. Let's hope that's easier than what I envision :)
I agree with your overall point, but as a (nearly middle aged) American, I've almost never commuted by car or lived in a single family house as an adult.
And frankly I'm sick of being lumped in to large generalizations of America that simply don't apply to me or millions of other people living here.
The media (including social media, and the internet) largely consists of the most divisive and stereotyped parts of life. America doesn't consist solely of highways and single family communities. There isn't just one "American lifestyle."
It's as annoying as the popular misconception that we have any real choices regarding our elected officials and their policies. Uhh, yeah, let me just build a whole slew of candidates from scratch who actually want to do anything about real root cause issues.
Racism is another one. I don't have any fscks left to give for anyone who wants to lecture me on racism in America. Our racial tensions are only visible because we aren't totally marginalizing (or cleansing for that matter) our minority populations.
Of course! But there are some tendencies, or else OP's comment wouldn't have made sense even in the context of the US.
My first few times in the US were in NYC, where I found a way of life that is very close to what I know as a Parisian. Imagine my surprise discovering basically any other city in the US.
You might not be part of that population, but the US problem goes way beyond a problem of perception, and there are numbers to confirm it.
Agreed, I was mostly complaining about using the phrase "the American Lifestyle" as if there was one lifestyle we all follow. There isn't, and the casual generalization of millions of people is inaccurate.
This is also narrowminded as much of Europe (even just EU for that matter) does not live in such idealized environment.
We don't all live in Amsterdam.
As other people pointed out: this varies wildly by city or region. In urban areas cars are really not incredibly common. In Berlin you'll find that only 1/3 of people even own a car. Of course, even fewer go to work by car.
In Munich, you'll find 1/2 of people owning a car.
I think it's far more localised than "city" or "region". It depends on where in the city the place of work is and if there is a car park.
E.g. the 2 biggest employers in Oxford UK are the University, where almost no one would commute by car, and the MINI car factory, where almost everyone would. That's because the University is in the historic part of town, with good bus service, near the main train station, easy cycling and no parking, but the car factory is at the edge of town, with good access to the road network and lots of parking.
Yep, even larger cities may not have public infrastruture that matches the requirement of all. I’ve had all kinds of jobs in the same area. One job was perfect for bus, another had biking as the fastest option. Current job and geography means that I can drive 15 - 20min, bike 60min or bus for 90min.
To contribute to the anecdotal evidences, at our company I would guess 25% and AFAIK they all live in the suburbs and drive to the nearest subway station in the city and use public transit the rest of the journey because traffic at start/end workday hours is a nightmare.
I don't think its necessarily US centric to live in a spread out way. Pretty much anywhere you have the combination of wealth + open space + uncomfortable weather you will see people spread out and drive places- ie Australia, Canada, parts of the Middle East. I personally have been happier living smaller human scale environments but Europe has a lot of natural advantages like milder climate and better social fabric/less crime that lets people live like this. When I lived in Japan people do actually commute in suits in the summer but enduring suffering is kind of a cultural norm there. Where I live people are not willing to be drenched in sweat walking to/from train stations which is what would happen.
The majority of people do need a car even in Europe.
In France, unless you live in central Paris you do. In the UK, unless you live in central London yo do. Now, if you live around Paris or London you may be able to commute to work by public transport, and many people do, indeed, but many also commute by car, and the vast majority do outside of these areas. I'm sure the same applies to many other countries.
Edit: By the way I am French and living in England, so I know full well from experience how important cars are for the majority despite small islands of some town centres where people can do without.
> you live in an individual house
On the other hand, living in an individual house with a garden is much nicer than living in a flat and many people (including in Europe) either do that or aspire to that.
I'm usually getting a lot of flack here for saying this, but if preserving the environment means severe constraints on people's lives (housing, diet, transport, etc) then perhaps the way forward is to reduce the global population to a point where that everyone can enjoy life while still preserving the environment.
My vision of an ideal future is everyone able to live in nature, in a house with a large garden, rather than in tower blocks, in pods, only eating what's allowed.
>The majority of people do need a car even in Europe.
>In France, unless you live in central Paris you do. In the UK, unless you live in central London yo do. Now, if you live around Paris or London you may be able to commute to work by public transport, and many people do, indeed, but many also commute by car, and the vast majority do outside of these areas. I'm sure the same applies to many other countries.
Actually in France it's much more than Paris, living in Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse, Besancon to name just some cities I'm familiar with, you can live without a car. Similarly in a lot of German cities even down to population levels of 50,000 people you can often live perfectly fine without a car.
>> you live in an individual house
>On the other hand, living in an individual house with a garden is much nicer than living in a flat and many people (including in Europe) either do that or aspire to that.
And a lot of people at the same time want those houses to be right in the city centre as well, and can't afford it. Also I think the flat vs house trade-off is a huge function of type and quality of flats and the city planning.
>I'm usually getting a lot of flack here for saying this, but if preserving the environment means severe constraints on people's lives (housing, diet, transport, etc) then perhaps the way forward is to reduce the global population to a point where that everyone can enjoy life while still preserving the environment.
Sounds like a great idea. It's funny how people regard reducing carbon emissions by changing behaviour (e.g. moving to flats, using less cars ...) unrealistic, but then put suggestions like this forward. How would you reduce earths population by a factor 2 in the next 100 years? Even if you could somehow do this, there would be huge economic implications (much bigger than going to a zero carbon economy in the same time).
> My vision of an ideal future is everyone able to live in nature, in a house with a large garden, rather than in tower blocks, in pods, only eating what's allowed.
What are you willing to give up for that future, because the reduction in population that would make this possible doesn't come for free.
> It's funny how people regard reducing carbon emissions by changing behaviour (e.g. moving to flats, using less cars ...) unrealistic, but then put suggestions like this forward.
I'm not suggesting that this is unrealistic or that we should not reduce emissions.
However, my view is that we live and work to make our lives more interesting and enjoyable, not to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of squeezing ever more of us on the planet.
The end of population growth, and even more population reduction, are massive changes to the way society and our economy work, I fully agree.
But ultimately this is unavoidable if we accept that population cannot grow forever on a finite planet (and it is already expected that it will stabilise of even decrease by the end of the century). I'm suggesting that we should therefore embrace this and see it as a positive rather than a negative (which is the usual view) because it has tremendous potential for making quality of life better for all humans in a sustainable way.
You might not hear about it as much because sadly the mass transit is underutilized by a lot of my neighbors. Also, people usually really prefer the freedom of having private transportation. Like, just riding a bicycle so max of ~5mi or so, I have maybe an option of three different supermarkets (six if you include pharmacies, which usually do stock some groceries). If you add a simple bus route, that adds maybe another two. If you choose to take a car, its literally more than dozen different super markets within a 10 minute drive which would have been an unrealistic bike ride or a complex bus path, which is not something you want to do with a week's worth of a family's amount of food you're carrying.
Its then the same thing when it comes to going to restaurants. I can easily walk to three or four restaurants. Bike, add another handful. Bus, add another dozen. A 10min drive? Literally a dozen options of practically any kind of food you could possibly imagine.
So you get less choices for more time if you ride a bike or take the bus. This is the math that most Americans do. Since its somewhat cheap to own a car for most of the US, they don't even stop to think of the cost of driving versus the cost of riding a bike or walking or taking the bus.
As to having a supermarket close by, the supermarkets near me as absolutely massive. The Kroger near me has at least 30 aisles, a full deli, full bakery, full butcher stand, full florist, fresh sushi station, massive produce section, and a hot and ready to go meal area. And its only about average sized for the area. If you've never seen them, modern American supermarkets are incredibly massive, larger than what I've seen of most European groceries. There's usually a bit of distance between them because they're such massive places. Its often not just a small hole in the wall grocer with a dozen or so aisles and a produce section.
I think part of the difference is density - my city is only about 3km x 3km. If I cycled 5 miles I'd end up in the next town along. I just looked on TripAdvisor to see how many restaurants were within that range but it maxxed out at 1,000+.
We do have big supermarkets too, at the edge of the city - about 75,000 sqft eyeballing it on Google Earth, apparently only a bit smaller than the average Walmart. I've never really seen why I would go there, except perhaps for ease of parking if I was going to buy a huge amount of food with a car. And this is France so even the tiny supermarkets make room for a bakery : )
So the maths here is mostly that cars are just negative. I'm very optimistic that electric bikes will begin to dominate transport in European cities - we just need to build the infrastructure to make sure that they're safe to ride.
They have over 3,400 stores at ~180,000sqft. There are three within a short drive from my home. They have ~190 around 40,000sqft. The ~800 mid-sized "discount" stores are mostly closing and don't have groceries, they're ~100,000sqft.
Big American stores are absolutely massive, and they're all over the place.
You mentioned you had like one of these massive stores at the edge of your town, and it was still only half as big. I've got several of these monsters within 8mi of my home.
I'll update the size of American supermarkets in my mind by 100% : )
There are broadly 5 big shops within comfortable distance of me - one of them is between 150-200,000 sqft [1], so I guess a mid-sized American store. But I've only been to one of them, when I needed some electronics, because I don't see the point otherwise. Presumably other people do or the shops wouldn't exist...
Unrelated - does "town" mean something different in American English? To me it means a place bigger than a village but smaller than a city. The city I'm in has 300k - 1m people in it, depending on how you draw the boundaries.
[1]: its car park extends onto its roof which I guess might be amusing to an American. Land is expensive here.
I said "town" due to the geographic size of ~3km^2. My "town", really a small city, is ~70km^2 and a population of ~100k. It is surrounded by other towns/cities forming the Dallas/Ft Worth Metroplex, which metro area is 24,000km^2 with ~6 million people in that space.
I just checked Google Maps, there are almost a dozen of these 180,000sqft Walmarts within a 10min drive (a "comfortable distance" here) from my home. And that's just Walmart, there's also probably another six or so Target locations of similar size. I do agree this is absolutely excessive and insane though, there's such a massive amount of real estate of just big box retail.
The reason why these stores are seemingly dominating local retail is the same reason why cars are dominating travel in the US or why Amazon seems to be dominating internet retail. Apparent convenience. Why bother going to a clothier, then go to a cobbler, then go to the electronics store, then go to a video store, then go to the furniture store, then go to the auto parts store, then go to the butcher, then go to the baker, then go to the grocer. Instead, you can do practically every bit of your shopping in a single store, all at once. Find some new linens for your bed, then go grab a new pair of shoes, better stock up on some fresh underwear, maybe that 40" TV we got a few years ago isn't cutting it get a bigger one, then grab some milk and eggs and we'll check out in the Auto department to pick up the car after the oil change.
Hah, I've actually looked at Dallas-Fort Worth before and been horrified at how so much of its residential green space is golf courses. Is most of the conurbation as well served by non-car transport or is your area a special case? It looks so low density that it's hard to imagine anything being economically viable. Then again, bike lanes and bike racks are so cheap that they're pretty much free.
I do understand consolidating regular purchases into one trip - I just go to the supermarket for food (and occasionally Asian supermarkets for non-perishables that French supermarkets don't sell). I don't see the added convenience in doing the same with once-in-5-year purchases. If anything I'd probably get fed up with walking past loads of things I wasn't remotely interested in buying. Maybe there's some spontaneity to buying stuff that I just don't have.
> Is most of the conurbation as well served by non-car transport or is your area a special case?
I'm definitely in the more special case kind of area, by choice. There were many reasons why I picked the place where I live, and transit options were one of the key ones.
> Maybe there's some spontaneity to buying stuff that I just don't have.
I feel you on this idea. I'm not really a huge fan of these ridiculously giant stores with absolutely massive parking lots, I'd like for smaller grocers to be more popular. In the US at least, smaller grocers are dying, and grocers surviving are building bigger stores to try and compete more on the level of those 180,000sqft behemoths. The death of the smaller grocers leave behind 15-20,0000sqft largely empty retail storefronts around, at least in the big cities.
> horrified at how so much of its residential green space is golf courses.
There's a municipal golf course real close to my house, at the edge of my neighborhood. What is so horrifying about it? This land was prairie land, so its not like we're greenifying the desert or something like that. It would have been a bunch of small rolling hills, creeks, small ponds, and grasses before it was a golf course. The people in the area like to golf, why is it any worse than it just being a more generic park? Would you have also expressed such horror if it was filled with frisbee golf courses, or soccer fields?
That said, within my neighborhood there's a several acre park that is a bit more of generic greenspace. It has playgrounds for kids, a fishing pond, a soccer field, a baseball field, a softball field, etc. It also has a bunch of picnic tables and grills scattered at the tree lines. These kinds of parks are pretty common around where I live as well. It is not like all parks are golf courses. Certainly more than what you'd see in France, but golf is also significantly more popular here than in urban areas of France I'd imagine. If nobody was using them I'd get the point of them being horrified at the waste, but for many of the golf courses you need to book your tee time days in advance.
I don't have anything against golf as such, it's more that from a distance they looked like really nice little parks that people could use to walk between neighbourhoods, socialise, walk dogs, picnic in etc. Then I zoomed in and realised it was probably only for people playing golf. Football pitches are less well camouflaged from satellite pictures, so they wouldn't be as disappointing. Golf courses are kind of inherently low density too - you can't really cram many more than five people onto each hole at once.
FWIW we do have golf clubs here - Cannes / Antibes in particular has loads - but that's unrepresentative of France as a whole.
Your park does sound nice. I'd heard stories of Americans in suburbs having to drive their dogs to places where they could be walked - maybe it was an exaggeration.
This would be very strange, maybe they meant take outside off a leash? I can take my dog to the park in my neighborhood but there are leash laws requiring him to be on-leash unless at a specified "dog park" fenced in space. There are a few dog parks that would be more in the driving kind of distance* which have separate fenced in areas depending on size. I mostly just take my dog around the park on his leash, or walk around the neighborhood, or just take advantage of the couple thousand square feet of yard I have in my backyard. After all, that's one of the many reasons why I have a yard, a nice safe place for my child and dog to play around in, a private place I can set up amateur radio antennas somewhat permanently, a private place I can grill and entertain at the private pool, etc. My dog can feel free to just leave to the backyard through a doggie door any time he wants and chase off the neighborhood cats, squirrels, rodents, etc.
At least when it comes to the municipal golf courses, those are usually open to the public during the day to walk all the trails around the courses. They're often also connected to the bike trails in the municipal area which are then usually connected to a lot of the other parks and nature preserves. There are over 80 miles of bike and walking trails in my small city that connect most of the parks and greenspaces. They are not bike lanes on a busy street; these are separate paths that cut through behind neighborhoods, down utility corridors, go under busy bridges, etc.
And I do acknowledge many French people love golf and there are golf courses around, but especially compared to DFW I can't imagine on average its as popular. I'd wager at least 20% of families have at least one full set of golf clubs, and a large percentage of them do some kind of golf event a few times a year. Dallas is the home of places like Top Golf, which is a massively popular evening outing. You wouldn't be able to even think about building something like this inside most urban areas of France, but DFW has four and they're always like a 30-40min wait.
* Its only a few miles on walking trails, but my dog would probably be halfway worn out just getting to the park and would be completely exhausted starting out the trip home.
It's not just London. I live in a city on the UK's south coast, I can drive but I don't, and I have never owned a car. Many people I know here also don't own cars, some of them can't drive. I've worked for outfits in London, in Nottingham (visiting about once a fortnight, train, hotel, train back) and here in Southampton, not a problem.
London is better because the Tories weren't able to abolish its public transport network and sell it off piecemeal - because the government's own workforce lives there and can't get anything done without that transport system, but even in a city with a dysfunctional semi-privatised mess of a transport system it's still just better than trying to turn everything into highways stacked upon highways forever so everybody can use private cars. There's actually a 70s-80s division of my city that was built with that approach, over the river, and it's awful there. But it's nice here and further into the city.
> perhaps the way forward is to reduce the global population to a point where that everyone can enjoy life
I definitely think people who believe this should agree which of you will die so that the others can "enjoy life". Are you volunteering? Because if not you don't have an actual proposal here, just ordinary selfishness.
> I definitely think people who believe this should agree which of you will die so that the others can "enjoy life". Are you volunteering? Because if not you don't have an actual proposal here, just ordinary selfishness.
Why do people feel the need to always make this sort of ridiculous comment?
Population cannot keep growing forever but it is still seen as positive and needed. First step would be to remove all incentive to have more children and to prioritise education and family planning worldwide. Then, we can think of how to adapt society to the consequences (which are coming anyway because that's already starting to happen). I'm only suggesting that we should embrace the trend instead of trying to delay it.
There has been a long and mostly fruitful conversation between the 'bright greens' and the 'crunchy greens', but it's time to resolve the difference.
The difference, briefly: bright greens (I prefer Viridian†) support a high-technology road to sustainability, while crunchy greens are about bringing our carbon footprint down to sane parameters through traditional lifeways and reduction in energy use.
Simply, we don't have time to indulge the crunchies any longer. Carbon zero isn't going to cut it, we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere and that calls for substantial additional energy.
Either we get everyone up to a nearly-American energy budget, with plenty left over for carbon capture, or we reduce everyone's standard to that of an Indian peasant and still roast.
There are Americans living in big houses, with good insulation and heat pumps, solar, and a battery bank, whose homes are net exporters of energy. This is not a total accounting due to embodied energy, but it points the way.
To me the solution has always been simple: tax carbon and apply the proceeds directly to subsidizing replacements for polluting technology. If you ask people to give up their lifestyle to 'save the planet' they're just going to ignore you, and if you try and force them, expect violent resistance.
The hard truth is that America has already flattened carbon emissions, and given our great wealth we're uniquely positioned to pay the new-technology premium to fund the transition to a sustainable technology stack. Most of us are willing, some of us are stubborn, but insisting that everyone live in a pod and eat bugs isn't a winning move. We're wealthy, relatively far north, and well armed: why should we?
Buildings generally lose or gain heat throughout the day, proportional to the indoor-outdoor temperature differential. So a building that maintains livable temperatures for say, 12h a day, will still have those energy leaks when the owner is out, and they would have to compensate in the evening the exact amount of energy lost or gained to get back to comfortable temperatures.
So unless your home has such ridiculously bad insulation that it quickly approaches outside temperature after turning off heating/cooling, you won't see significant energy savings by going outside of the house half the time. Never mind multiple occupants, kids and the elderly, pets, diverging working hours etc.
A home that has AC running half of the day will use a lot less energy in total than one running all day long. There are substantial efficiency losses from heat leaking in, which will be exacerbated by trying to maintain a larger temperature delta 24 hours of each day. A house is not a perfect temperature battery on the scale of hours, far from it.
Depends on house type. For american-style wooden houses that might be true, but where buildings are built primarily using concrete with outer insulation, their thermal mass and inertia is much bigger.
It's going to vary entirely depending on your dwelling type. But that's a red herring I think. We need to make homes energy efficient anyway (regardless where people work) and once you've insulated/moved to more efficient heating/cooling then the cost of keeping your dwelling running for the hours you're personally out should be pretty low. Not to mention however many households have to be kept warm/cool because there are other household members home.
This reductive argument is rather tiresome. All human activity has a cost. Humans are social beings. HN may want to shill for being cooped up but that doesn't represent how most of the world live or want to live
Usually it needs to be done by predicting ahead, e.g. so you put on more busses when there is a football game, or when it's School or University term time.
I've had better level of social interactions since I started staying home and the quality of my relationships are much better than the surface ones I have with my coworkers.
While good public transport helps to cut the carbon emissions, it also isn't free and can only be established above certain population density. This creates pressure for people to live in a big cities and that causes a lot of problems.
The bikes are nice idea, but hardly panacea. You need to design the city around it (costly, conflicts with other usages), isn't possible for variety of people (age, disability, distance).
I used to drive 40km to work every day in single direction. Not gonna happen with a bike.
> I haven't ever used a car to go to work in my life.
Think that depends a lot on where you live. When I was a student, I didn't use a car at all, but my wife did during my PhD to get to work, and now we both have to have cars because our commutes are not practical by public transport. This is living in the Midlands in the UK.
The "Entfernungspauschale" is not tied to the mode of transportation. You get a tax write off for the distance that you commute (regardless if you walk, drive a car, take a bike or ride a train). But I do believe it's the wrong incentive.
Whenever this topic comes up people present being social at work like a good thing. Everyone in all the jobs I've had were big drinkers, some of them probably used drugs, and some of them even used to boast about cheating on their wife. Not having to deal with these people any more than necessary is a blessing.
> We're not Europeans here, Raphael. We don't want to be.
Speak for yourself. Almost everybody I know would be thrilled to see better transit, walking, and bicycle options even if it means getting rid of their car and yard.
As said in another comment, that's completely and demonstrably false.
As soon as a coding standard for C/C++ doesn't completely forbid the use of pointers (which is completely impossible at least in C), then it will be much more unsafe than Ada (or other alternatives like Rust).
You can have - very painfully - near pointer free programming in C++, but it requires the use of high level constructs (smart pointers, RAII, etc) that most if not all safety critical standards forbid the use of.
Some people like the Frama-C people are trying to make programming in - a restricted an enhanced subset of - C, safe. They're basically doing Ada/SPARK with annotations in C, and it's horribly painful.
So, despite its informed and documented appearances, your comments are spreading misinformation about what it's like to program in C/C++ for safety critical systems.
Astrée static analysis tool detects invalid pointer dereferences. It can give false alarms but it always detects errors. It does this buy using abstract interpretation on the semantics. It's essentially partial execution.
> C/C++ is used over Ada just for familiar syntax. From a safety perspective, the choice of language is inconsequential. With C/C++ the code analyzers used must do more work than with Ada but not that much.
That is completely and utterly false despite the millions (billions ?) invested in trying to make sound & safe static analysis tools for C/C++. I know you're trying to push that message but it couldn't be further from the truth. The nature of C & C++ is such that you cannot avoid unsafety, even with very restricted subsets.
Disclaimer: I work on Ada tools, but have also worked on C/C++ tools. I have also studied MISRA C and worked on such static analyzers for C & C++.
Also highly subjective but the syntax hurts my eyes.
So I’m kind of interested by an answer to the question this articles fails to answer. Why do you guys find Zig so cool ?