As you mentioned 38 languages, chances are high that these languages are not all coming from a scientific background, where 1 index based adressing of items is the norm. What is your take in respect to Julia, which is also one offset based?
TBH, that's like whitespace in Python. You can do endless bike shedding about it, but ultimately it's very simple to deal with, and after a few days you never think about it anymore.
One-index based addressing of items was the norm in most of the mathematics or physics books written before WWII, but even then there were exceptions, e.g. for the components of a quadri-vector or a quadri-tensor, i.e. for spatio-temporal vectors and tensors, it was already common to use the indices 0, 1, 2 and 3 for the temporal component and for the 3 spatial components, instead of the indices 1, 2, 3 and 4.
However, this tradition is worth nothing, because before automatic computers the use of decimal numbers instead of binary numbers was also the norm, like also the use of big-endian numbers instead of little-endian numbers. Having to actually implement the computational operations in hardware has revealed that many such traditions were sub-optimal.
Despite the fact that among my programming interests the scientific-technical computational problems have always been on the top and I have started programming with the Fortran language, I have always recognized that using 1-index based array addressing is inferior and any programming language that uses this convention makes a mistake, because this increases the chances of programmer off-by-one errors, by requiring more complex index expressions in many cases.
If anything, my opinion is that programming languages should not support any of such obsolete "norms", but they should go further in replacing them.
For instance, I believe that for integer constants and printed numbers it is still OK to use decimal numbers, because this simplifies mental computations for most humans, who have memorized the multiplication table of decimal numbers and because the conversions between decimal and binary integer numbers are exact, so it does not matter which base is used to display them to humans.
On the other hand, I believe that for floating-point constants and printed numbers it is a mistake to use decimal numbers, instead of using hexadecimal numbers for the significand and decimal numbers only for the exponent (like when printed by printf with the %A or %a conversion specifiers). The reason is that the conversion between floating-point decimal and binary numbers is slow and inexact, introducing rounding errors, without providing any advantage for a human who reads the program text or a table with results.
Comparing hexadecimal floating-point numbers is actually faster and easier for a human reader, than when working with decimal numbers, because the numbers are shorter. Except for comparison, a human will not do any other exact mental computations when reading a set of floating-point values. (At most, when looking at a column of numbers displayed as fixed-point values, a human might add one or a few of the digits, to check that their sum matches the corresponding digits in a displayed total value, but unlike multiplication, addition is almost as simple for hexadecimal numbers as it is for decimal numbers.)
Approximate mental computations are also easier to do with binary floating-point numbers than with decimal floating-point numbers, if you understand how to do them (which is by using logarithms in any mental computations; this is true for both binary and decimal floating-point numbers, because approximate conversions between numbers and their logarithms are very easy to do mentally, as any engineer working with decibels knows). Doing just the simple operations with exponents provides already a better accuracy than for decimal numbers, because an octave is smaller than a decade. For additional accuracy, it is usually enough in mental computations to approximate the floating-point values to 3 points per octave, in which case the approximation error is about the same as when doing approximate mental computations using decibels.
In decades of programming, I have never encountered any case when I would have wanted for my program to contain decimal floating-point constants, or for any result to be printed as a decimal floating-point value, but I have encountered the opposite case, when a programming language annoyed me because it forced the use of decimal floating-point constants, which introduced undesirable rounding errors, so I had to use equivalent integer constants and use something like memcpy to convert them into the desired floating-point numbers.
Nearly all languages designed for mathematics are 1-based - R, Matlab, Mathematica, etc. because that's the mathematical convention and allows using formulas directly. The fact that Python isn't is a drawback in the domain.
This is why AI is better at writing code than humans. They just write code and don’t complain about things that don’t matter, like indexing; or another classic, spaces vs tabs. Humans must learn to get past these things.
I would like to see small appliances inbuilt batteries (mostly Li-Ion based) be prohibted. It contributes to device obsolescence and is a security risk --> burning waste dumps.
I think this regulation that comes into effect February of next year concerns all kinds of batteries, not only those of smartphones https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... . I think, because I didn't doublecheck right now further than reading the first matching "appliances" paragraph (ctrl-f).
What I know off the top of my head, from reading the legislation a while ago. Is that technical reasons, such as waterproof devices, will still be able to retain non user replaceable batteries if it is needed to keep the device waterproof.
While meat was definitely a caloric bonanza for early humans, recent primate studies offer evidence that sugary fruits continued to be a critical “brain food.” A 2017 paper looked at 140 primate species and compared their brain sizes with their diets.
“What [that study] showed very clearly was that the fruit-eaters, the frugivores, had 25 percent bigger brains, on average, than the folivores, the leaf-eaters,” Brand-Miller says. The fruit-eaters also had bigger brains than the omnivores, which ate meat.
I have a package on the way with AliExpress. It is headed from somewhere in China to somewhere in the US.
Using my computer just now, I looked at one of the emails that AliExpress sent about this order. It had a clickable tracking number displayed; I clicked it.
That brought me to their website, where I landed on a page that included the last update for my order and also a link to "View Details".
That works for me. It was very easy to where along the line my stuff is (and that it is not in the US yet).
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Meanwhile: I also copied the tracking number from the email. I pasted that tracking number into the box at usps.com.
The USPS knows of my tracking number and they do not have my item yet. Fair enough.
I ticked some boxes and told them to send me updates, which I'm sure they'll do once they have updates to send -- just as they have done for ~decades now.
Many sites will work fine in a desktop browser but refuse to do anything in a mobile browser, demanding you install their app or just immediately redirecting you to the iOS or Android app store.
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