Waiting 4 weeks won't hurt the artist given the media industry's really-slow-payment policy to content creators.

I agree with your first point, You cannot judge all by one.

It could be a student learning. Learning does involve initiative. However, learning from the top of the tree does not teach you much about its roots or environment.

I believe Richard Gabriel addressed your last point. See: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

That is not an insult, it is a truth. People, business especially, produce and request minority feature-sets for majority demands. See: design by committee, almost any production automobile, the majority of mobile phones, etc, etc.

So true. With both sides of the remote-face-delivery-portal implemented in HTML5, will the Flash (finally) end open up the internet for real creativity and minimal-capital moving content distribution?

"You seriously consider malice to be a reason why the compiler rejects your program"

Of course it's malice.

Someone has never dealt with incompetently written scripting languages or tragically wrong documentation for the same. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

I remember having to test exactly how a bunch of different predicates actually worked, when the documentation thereof was a complete lie and the predicates just evaluated to false instead of creating an error when fed data they supposedly accepted (but actually couldn't).

the compiler in many simple cases could have tried to repair the program, like attempting to insert(remove) missing(extra) ';' or '}' for example. While it may be not a malice, it is definitely an absence of a good will.

Note: i did work on a real product which had parser inside that had such style of repair implemented, and such approach is also quickly mentioned in the dragon book as well

It's possible that such automatic repair would create a bug. Much safer to have a human check and ensure that the ; goes in the right place.

A better point is that the error messages from many compilers can be very obscure. This was particularly true 10-15 years ago.

Yeah, if a compiler only compiles the code you actually wrote, it's still your fault. If a compiler tries to infer what you meant and compiles that instead, then it might genuinely be the compiler's fault when something breaks. Plus, the original code should still be fixed instead of relying on the compiler to compile the same broken code the same "right" way each time. We spent the last 20 years trying to convince web developers of that idea.

Clang does something like this. If it notices a simple enough syntax error that it can correct, it still generates the error message but it makes the correction internally and continues the compilation far enough to generate useful error messages about the rest of the code. But it doesn't output anything or change the code.

"This is an intro to Python course and he's making us do all these complex progrms when we're still python noobs"

I suppose you would need to learn everything between 0 and completion in order to produce the products he is demanding of you.

Perhaps there's a point to all this learning...

technology is amateur. technology probably shouldn't be analyzed by analog methodologies either.

how apple(substitute any company) 'catches on' can be derived from http://ow.ly/59Maa. our perception isn't as important as the ubiquity of that which is available to perceive.

apple properties will catch on as long as they don't go out of business or lose the power to shout about their products(though this probably sits under the former).