So if the fees on non-Dutch European and Dutch cards are the same, what explains this? Xenophobia? That is what my colleagues in Holland say.

But we also know why a European home grown payments system is not happening. The incumbent banks hate it and have enough power to block such solutions.

And data.tables in R is faster (and I think nicer to write) than DataFrames in Julia. And since data.tables feed my optimization, R still wins.

Now, I generally use Julia for heavy computes, and usually its much faster than R. But not always.

And this little bit of code runs for hours on the largest instance on AWS every day. Why I was looking so speed it up.

It is the best way I have seen to make diagrams with code, which can be very convenient.

so python takes instrument data and writes latex with pstricks, then to ps to pdf/svg/png/* to insert into whatever doc my colleagues are making

We are continually evaluating alternatives as latex is a heavy dependency, but nothing works as well, yet.

and even more importantly it has worked for 10 years and likely will work for the next 50 years with exactly the same code.

Latex is horrible but makes beautiful documents and the relevant world either uses latex or Mircosoft Office. Why use anything else? Latex lives by the community of people who use latex for their work and to collaborate. All know 20 year old latex documents will be compilable in 20 years. No competitor outside of Microsoft can survive that.

And, after much cursing, and my team spending time changing the text, I reflected, and came to like those punctuation markers. Took me a long time, but I have been converted.