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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15626 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Central planning fails again.

Every single time. This happens every time where you try to engineer around the existence of the human soul, and it will continue to happen, forever. There is a war going on between the ensouled and the enslaved, and you can see it playing out here. The enslaved, who occupy places like HR departments, CPS field agencies, reddit moderation discords, city ordinance compliance departments, HOA boards, and Rust governance bodies, fight against the idea that an ensouled human being might have their own ideas about how to live their life, or how to manage the memory on their own computer.

C is god's language, and as counterintuitive as it may sound: so is python. All other languages exist only to build a path towards enslavement.

I guess we know whose language is PowersHell. (I actually really like powershell, but I might be lawful evil)

This happens every time where you try to engineer around the existence of the human soul, and it will continue to happen, forever

Yes, some of the ensouled will find a way around whatever barriers you put in place, but at some point you still need to at least try to bend incentive structures to reduce, if not outright eliminate, murders and the like.

so is python

Can you explain why for the non-CS-minded (me)?

Python is very golden retriever coded.

Python doesn't ever error because it thinks you've made a mistake, it only stops you if it can't figure out what you are asking it to do. It does force you to use garbage collection and the language features love hashmaps but is generally very unopinionated on anything else.

PHP is even better about not stopping if it thinks you made a mistake - try to open a file that doesn't exist? Yeah, sure, fine, just return false. Loop through false? Of course, obviously that's intended behaviour. Mix and match numeric and stringy keys in an array? No problem, it's a hashmap, and it'll even sort for you.

If Python and C are the languages god wants us to use, PHP is the language he uses himself.

(In case you couldn't tell, /s).

If C and python are God's languages, then God asks us to live in caves in the desert while the sinful inherit the Earth. Yes it's holy and virtuous, but you can't build the tower of babel with it.

God knows that it is our fate to spend our lives in the darkness, and knows that we'll need a light.

C is the language which feels like it can get us out, but python is the language that will be there for us when we can't.

Hey, C combines the power of assembly with the elegance of assembly, as the joke goes.

Python has completely different problems. On the one hand, the duck typing means that erroneous assumptions about types may go undetected for a long time before blowing up in a completely innocent part of the code. (As far as a weakly typed piece of code can be innocent, that is.)

More critically, it is slow. Reading a field of an object, or calling a function defined in some global scope, both require a lookup in a hash maps, where in C they former would be pure pointer arithmetic and the latter would be resolved by the linker (or earlier) and turned into a constant runtime statement.

You can build anything with C if you're not a coward.

You can build anything out of toothpicks and tissue paper. Doesn't mean it's a good idea.

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