It's not just that they aren't free of bias. They appear to incubate truly wacky stuff - Leverage Research [1], the Zizians, all the AI/x-risk stuff. I am not the only person to have noticed this [2]. There's something about their approach that appears to actually make people more susceptible to nonsense, not less.
Where does that come from though? I don't see any flow control or anything else compute-y in the bytecode itself. I know unpickling can run Python code, but i wouldn't say that makes the bytecode itself Turing-complete.
Not sure if this is related, but i'd love to see more scripting languages (mostly Python) offer facilities which let them take over from shell script for more scripts and one-liners.
Think about what it would take to write this in Python right now:
for wmv_file in $(find $1 -name '*.wmv'); do
echo -n "${wmv_file} "
ffmpeg -i $wmv_file ${wmv_file%.wmv}.mpg 2>&1 | grep kb/s: || echo "ERROR $?"
done
With a few handy variables and functions predefined, this could be something like:
for wmv_file in find(argv[1], glob="\*.wmv"):
print(wmv_file, end=" ")
result = do("ffmpeg", "-i", wmv_file, basename(wmv_file, ".wmv") + ".mpg")
if result: print(grep(str(result), "kb/s:"))
else: print("ERROR", result.status)
It's probably the sanest adaptation of the point to the metric system. A traditional point is close to a third of a millimetre, but that's too weird.
Since the Q is close to 3/4 of a traditional point, it's also quite easy to convert from traditional multiple-of-three point sizes: 9 pt -> 12 Q, 12 pt -> 16 Q, etc.
Although it's even easier just to call those 3 mm and 4 mm!
If anyone is curious and near South Kensington, there is now a little exhibition on urushi at the V&A [1], which includes a film of a guy who harvests his own sap, processes it into lacquer, and then makes things with it.
That video is not online AFAICT, but there is another one about another artist, which includes some footage of an urushi workshop preparing the stuff, and her using it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeult7lZtbg
What is going on with Japanese lacquer at the moment? There's this. There's the MSI Prestige 13 AI+ Ukiyo-e Edition [1]. The V&A opened an exhibition on it last weekend [2]. The Times had a puff piece on it a few months ago [3]. Is urushi suddenly cool? If so, why? Did the Urushi Marketing Board decide to have a big push, pull some strings, and now it's everywhere? I'm not complaining at all, just mildly puzzled.
As it happens, i saw the exhibition at the V&A today. It's decent, but small. Has a bunch of artefacts, and then some videos of some of the artists working, which are interesting.
That was a long and dark time in history. We're still in the shadow of it. But these days a much better world is available - a more powerful language, good libraries, and much, much simpler frameworks.
To be clear, all the annotation and Java EE stuff is still going if you want it!