So half the students in each year fail and have to retake the class? That seems hard to sustain over an entire education system. Or am I misunderstanding this?
I mostly agree, but given where it was posted (oppugn.us, a site for "rants"), I would cut some slack. If it was posted on Zed's "real" blog, Shedding Bikes, then I would agree with you completely.
Sorry, my comment was unclear. I meant that vimperator changed in order to make use of the type to narrow system, which was not available with the previous one.
Sort of off topic, but Netflix sends my house snail mail ads, even thought we're already subscribers. I have no idea why, since it seems like it would be easy to fix.
I should probably stress that I agree with you on pretty much everything except that last sentence.
As for the Miller-Rabin test, it's basically a case where you can get a correct answer with an arbitrarily low probability of error. So I guess the tie in is that just because our decisions are predictable (or at least mostly so), doesn't mean there isn't randomness involved.
I'm starting to suspect that I'm responding to an interpretation you didn't intend, though.
One option would be Scheme with Bootstrap (http://www.bootstrapworld.org/). It's a middle school program, but you could probably strip it down for third graders.