Python is one of the slower languages.

But forced indentation does cause code to be more readable at a glance which helps you think about what you are doing.

The Right To Be rude - where ESR revealed his expulsion and the controversy that led to it

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8609

Non-discrimination is a core value of open source

Today I learned that something called the Lerna project has added a codicil to its MIT license denying the use of its software to a long list of organizations because it disagrees with a political choice those organizations have made.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8106

Why Hackers Must Eject The SJWs

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918

A lot of things were easier before that intractable mass of malevolent incompetence infested Linux like a brain eating amoeba.

Apologies. Edited and corrected.

Debian founder, Ian Murdock died on Dec 28 1916. The coroner returned a verdict of suicide.

On the evening of December 28, the 42-year-old fired off a string of increasingly incoherent tweets, claiming he had been beaten up by police officers near his home on Green Street, San Francisco, and was threatening to kill himself. Fearing he was going to take his own life, his friends on the internet called the city's police department, who sent round a cop to check on him.

Peering through a window, the officer could see the open-source guru lying face down on his stairs. The cop kicked down the locked front door, and found Murdock naked and lifeless with electrical cord around his neck. He was confirmed dead at 7.40pm.

[...] In signing off the autopsy report, Dr Amy Hart, assistant medical examiner, said the death was suicide by hanging, noting that Murdock suffered from "alcohol abuse with withdrawal seizures and Asperger's syndrome."

The etymology of the word 'heterosexual' is strange. It was first coined to refer to someone with heterogeneous sexual practices, i.e sexual practices differing from the norm, i.e. fucking perverts and faggots.

Maybe IBM bought Red Hat so that they could have their own proprietary fork to sell while the publicly maintained edition tranny-rots to hell.

The article compares COBOL specifically to its main rival in enterprise, Java, not making a more general claim. Obviously, other languages with optimizing compilers and fast math libraries would perform comparably or better.

No, but they mention the BigDecimal class (on which CobolNumber is presumably based) and there is some discussion of performance cost:

BigDecimal vs double: illustration of accuracy and performance impact

 Time taken for double calculation: 1.716163ms
 Time taken for Kahan double calculation: 3.549576ms
 Time taken for BigDecimal calculation: 97.298124ms
 Value diff for simple sum: 8.68145523891E-10
 Value diff for Kahan sum: 1.854476109E-12

Performance of Java Code Translated from COBOL, UniqueSoft

https://www.uniquesoft.com/pdfs/UniqueSoft-Performance-Considerations-COBOL-to-Java.pdf

COBOL is a compiled language with stack allocation, pointers, unions with no run-time cost of conversion between types, and no run-time dispatching or type inference. Java, on the other hand, runs on a virtual machine, has heap allocation, does not have unions, incurs overhead when converting between types, and uses dynamic dispatching and run-time type inferencing. While it is possible to minimize the amount that these features are used, that usually comes at the cost of having code that is not very “Java like”. A common complaint with translators is that the resulting Java code is unreadable and unmaintainable, which defeats much of the purpose of the migration.

Adios, LLVM. It looks like that project is about to be converged and diverted from its original purpose into politics. Time to fork!

He agrees to let her call the app hers - she agrees not to falsely #metoo him?