Can you skip them in a typed language? Yes, just use any, Object or whatever the equivalent.
Can you add them to an untyped language? No.
They are not needed anywhere. But I argue that especially JavaScript module-systems would have benefited greatly from them.
A million lost hours in fixing obscure "undefined is not a function"-errors from output of highly dynamic pluggable build/transpiler-systems like webpack, requirejs, babel, buck etc. could have been avoided.
1. Try a completely functional language like Haskell once to learn about side-effects.
2. If you do multi threading: Look into Immutability and communicating sequential processes
3. Use static analysis / linters / code checkers for every language you use. They provide a lot of tips. There are linters for bash and Dockerfiles as well.
I wrote an autohotkey script for windows to assign alt-* to most shortcuts which would require ctrl-*.
Alt is physically where Macs Cmd is, so I had Alt-A for Cmd-A, Alt-F for Cmd-F, Cmd-W and so forth. This made a big difference.
Also I installed EasyWindowSwitcher and assigned it to a shortcut, which gave me window-cycling like in mac.
> Copying the text gives: “ch a i r m a n ' s s tat em en t” Reconstructing the original text is a difficult problem to solve generally.
Why not looking for stretches characters with spaces between them, then concatenate, check against a dictionary and if a match is found, remove the spaces.
"Where earlier reductions were largely negated by rising imports, the past decade has seen genuine cuts in the amount of CO2 for which the UK is responsible."
Not really, since everybody who cloned a repo has a full copy of everything.
Reminds me of the saying that writing git was just a backup strategy for Linus Torvalds: FTP-mirrors were the first step to ensure that the kernel was never lost, git was needed to mirror the source-history as well.
> The argument is that GPT3 has no understanding of the world, just superficial understanding of words and their relationships.
We don't really know what "understanding of the world" means in humans.
We just "see it when it's there".
We might be radically different from GPT-3, or we might not.
Our way of learning is different in any way.
Something that came to my mind: Various GPT-3 answers resemble answers given by children: Mostly correct, but having misunderstood some crucial point.
In real human learning and conversation these points are easily corrected by feedback by explanation: "You see, the point is no one wears bathing suites to work".
Which would then be incorporated as new wisdom.
Maybe this feedback-mechanism is what GPT-3 is missing. Maybe we should talk to it.