There's a common thought pattern among conspiracy theorists. "Some conspiracies turn out to be real" so that justifies their belief in their very specific conspiracy theory. The same pattern occurs when we talk about chemicals in our diet or the environment. "Some chemicals turn out to be dangerous" but that doesn't prove that a specific concentration of a specific chemical is doing anything, unless we have data to support the claim.

The same argument applies to pesticide or any other substance. Without talking about specific numbers, it's just speculation.

Zig professes to be a C replacement, not a C++ replacement, so leaving out operator overloading is consistent with that design goal. But I agree, I would prefer to program in a language that expresses mathematical relationships more naturally.

AGI isn't a well-defined concept. So when people say something isn't "real AI" because it's not AGI, I can't take them seriously because they're implying that everything the field has worked on for the past 70 years isn't real AI.

We need to remember what "Artificial Intelligence" actually means. It refers to the field of research starting in the 1950's developing algorithms related to combinatorial search, planning, and reasoning. Machine Learning isn't AI in the sci-fi movie sense, but it's among the topics you'll find in a textbook like Russell and Norvig.

A problem like protein folding isn't tangentially related to AI, it's at the heart of the kinds of problems the field has been trying to tackle for decades. Yet when there are legitimate breakthroughs, people deride it as "not real AI."

AI is also probably more effective with statically typed languages since the compiler catches a wider range of errors.

You'll end up with a strong understanding of the subset of the language that's actually useful for the thing you want to build.

I would say the more harmful slogan has been "you're okay just the way you are." I'm not saying we go back to harsh discipline and abuse, but there has to be a middle ground where we hold children, especially boys, to a higher standard.

>Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.