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total__C's comments

total__C | 12 years ago | on: Why the Twentieth Century Was Not a Chinese Century

So modern Chinese consider their country to have been stagnant during the entirety of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties? I've read a number of Western books about Qing-era China trying to understand the same questions the linked article discusses - why China doesn't already rule the world. The way things are presented, the Qing rulers and court just seem to be generally incompetent and isolated from their contemporary reality.

So within China the understanding is that the problems go back to before the Qing?

total__C | 12 years ago | on: The Second Coming of Java

Groovy's niche is supposed to be the same as Ruby or Python - if you want high performance, it's not the way to go. I've done a lot of Groovy for simple web applications and it works very well.

You don't have to use funny operator overloads if you use scala! Making your code readable in that language is definitely up to the developer.

total__C | 12 years ago | on: The Second Coming of Java

Calling the JVM platform a relic is a major mistake - the number of businesses that rely on the platform is massive.

However Java-the-language has been stagnant since Java 1.5 in September 2004. The Java API has had some changes but the language has remained mostly unchanged. The 1.8 version promises some nice improvements inspired by FP languages. Unfortunately, 1.8 has been continuously delayed with a current release date of sometime in early 2014. For JVM developers who care about their productivity, moving over to languages such as Scala, Groovy, and Clojure is the only sane choice.

total__C | 12 years ago | on: Sergey Brin invests in synthetic beef

Something I've always wondered about regarding synthetic meat:

for say synthetic pork, would it be necessary to mechanically 'exercise' the muscle fibers in order for them to taste the same as pork from a pig?

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