tetrislife

If they didn't use sub-standard materials, there wouldn't be big repair contracts, would there? Guess who will land them.

This is par for the course in India. They siphon off taxes this way, and on environmentally-inadvisable things no less. But that is how it is structured, weak-to-non-existent urban local bodies, and tax collection and disbursement centralized like it was in the times of the colonizer. That big pot of money is intensively fought over.

That is great. But isn't this more than the scientific method? It is rigor, and the capacity to look at all the factors in reality instead of cherry-picking one for a laboratory experiment.

I do agree we all could do with more rigor and also avoid cherry-picking factors to study, in any discipline.

there's already mountains of evidence of static typing making code significantly less buggy on average

What is this mountain of evidence? The only evidence I remember about bugginess of code across languages is that bug count correlates closely to lines of code no matter the language.

That sounds like a laundry list of tech thrown together for effect. It is not even relevant. You are talking empirically-proven tech as a counterpoint to laboratory-only experiments, aren't you?

I don't know about the Wright brothers, but the human-powered flight bounty was apparently won using the strategy of fast iteration to empirically identify the solution. GPS too would have been built on real-world feedback iterations.

Computing hardware is a special case, where they replicate the laboratory into a billion-dollar structure and call it ... 'fab' ;-)

The scientific method shorn of contact with reality, like with most research nowadays and especially in medicine, is just for show.

I submit that laboratory-experiment-based understanding being valid in real-world use, in any domain, is itself a belief rather than knowledge. And in such an unstructured domain as software development, it is even less likely.

Thanks for posting this! That blogsite is always very productive reading.

I don't get the obsession with the scientific method. Movie quote: "we don't live in the courtroom, your Honor; do we?". You can eliminate outliers like experts and students, hobby projects and lives-at-stake projects; everything you are left with is a good reflection of the industry. Example: any study with Java versus Python has to count.

I have no real experience with dynamic languages, so I can understand where the blog responses about dynamic languages having extra bugs come from. But they miss the important point about dynamic languages allowing for non-trivial solutions in fewer lines of code - matching that would basically need to be implemented in the static language, with the accompanying code bloat, under-implementation, bugginess, etc.

I think the reference to 0install's porting is real experience of the difference between Python and OCaml. Caveat: author Thomas Leonard is a seriously expert practitioner.

Would the Delta Chat e-mail client or the Monocles Chat XMPP client help? They both support webapps-in-chat (WebXDC), and a calendar is one of the many simple apps already created. https://webxdc.org/

The big emitters are still shy of discussing per-capita numbers, so those numbers might still be unreasonably high. If only there was reportage of those ...

It is a joke that the colonizers didn't return what they stole, India might have done "better" then.

I notice this sneaky snarkiness in reportage everywhere. The West's "progressiveness" is flaunted using per-capita nunbers, while the others' "backwardness" is backed up by absolute numbers. Flip the choice of numbers, and the whole picture flips!

All you need to know is whether the big per-capita polluters are driving down their consumption. And they are not, are they?

Well, population density does that, I guess! Not much to be done about it, even in other parts of India with population not as crazily dense as Mumbai.

Between that and avoidable traffic jams created by vehicles blocking intersections, cycling may be the fastest method but also needs breathing more polluted air. But the time overhead of public transport can't be reduced with this population density. So ... a rock and a hard place!

Traffic density doesn't cause any problem, it is slow traffic anyway, especially last-mile localities. Maybe there are no local trains on his route.

The main concern with traffic density would be polluted air, which you'd breathe more of when cycling.

Mumbai has very frequent local trains, right? And buses?