So, might this not indicate that chimps are slowly but surely evolving toward a higher intellect, as a harsh environment selects against the dumb?
If there were no matriarchs capable of grasping a concept like hunting with weapons, instead of bare hands, 100 years ago, does that mean that they might unravel stone sharpening in 500 years?
The idea that human civilization might witness the true, literal evolution and flourishing of a second earthly intellect in species outside of humans is really exciting.
Maybe it's not evolution in action. Maybe chimpanzees of today are no smarter than 100 years ago. Maybe it takes 50 years of trial and error amongst social groups to learn such a skill, and then retain it across generations by teaching. Maybe tools like this have been invented and lost many times by various chimpanzee social groups over the past few centuries.
But it would still be really cool if this were representative of the emergence of a generation of apes, palpably smarter than those of, say, the 19th century.
I really don't mind the part about Java where class names and variable names are long and wordy, and camel cased almost to the point that a fully qualified class name, including the package name, becomes something of a run-on sentence.
This part ties directly into the premise of interactive tooling, in that, once you have an IDE with tab completion for all your types and methods, you notice the huge benefit this adds when confronting gigantic but powerful, feature-complete libraries. Doubly so, for a compiled language that can accurately infer syntax integrity as you type, based on compiled binaries that don't require painfully witchy runtime linking against fragile, obscure file system paths.
As long as you don't shoot yourself in the foot (or let some grumpy, adversarial senile developer hobble you) with a horrid, torturous crackpot scheme of reflection and introspection, or stultifying nightmare-mode XML, Java's still pretty damn handy any old day of the week.
There's definitely still an enterprisey, corporate air to the culture of Java, and it can be near as bad as dealing with an obnoxious Oracle DBA, or a smug Dennis Nedry Windows admin, but that's more a political issue than a programmerly issue. Is that the product of an "evil bit" flipped to "true" on a league of legends server? I'm not so sure. Newer languages get a lot of bro-grammers, so I'd say pick your poison...
If there were no matriarchs capable of grasping a concept like hunting with weapons, instead of bare hands, 100 years ago, does that mean that they might unravel stone sharpening in 500 years?
The idea that human civilization might witness the true, literal evolution and flourishing of a second earthly intellect in species outside of humans is really exciting.
Maybe it's not evolution in action. Maybe chimpanzees of today are no smarter than 100 years ago. Maybe it takes 50 years of trial and error amongst social groups to learn such a skill, and then retain it across generations by teaching. Maybe tools like this have been invented and lost many times by various chimpanzee social groups over the past few centuries.
But it would still be really cool if this were representative of the emergence of a generation of apes, palpably smarter than those of, say, the 19th century.