Yes, although you don't have to be so perlish as to do the if in that order

    do:
        thing()
        thing()
        if condition:
            continue

It is not always economically rational though. The US has a history of using eminent domain to grab neighbourhoods full of small businesses so that they can be turned over to a big development projects of nominally higher value. Then the big developer pulls out or goes bankrupt, and the result is a ruined, rat-infested empty lot.

Those cases involving eminent domain and rats are the most dramatic, but it works at a more pedestrian level too. Say a government wants to dispose of some disused rail-yard or something. A developer who says "I'm going build some big shiny shops and attractions here" has better optics than a developer who says "I'm going to lay down some infrastructure and parcel the land up to whoever wants to buy it, nature will decide what the land is used for".

The latter is actually quite likely to produce the higher economic value land use, but there is no good political narrative. And in a world of strict zoning rules, there might not even be a legal framework for it.

> Right, that's how you could plausibly have made one or two, as a palace amusement, or a circus act. It's a little surprising this didn't happen (as far as I know).

You also need people to ride it. It wouldn't fly as a palace amusement because the king (and more importantly the little prince) would keep falling off. They won't have an incentive to value the skill until there is a horde of middle-class, 19th century, hipsters showing him up.

A circus act is more plausible, but only if there's some continuum of other simpler circus equipment leading up to this rather sophisticated bit of engineering.

> That does not sound like a good argument at all. Metal for vast majority of human history gave you massive edge in weapon technology. Some Mandarin just shut something like that down? Seems super unlikely

The assumption here is that every thing works in a clear way so you can see the military or whatever advantages of a particular phenomenon. Now I don't know if AnimalMuppet is literally correct that the bureaucracy simply shut down the steel industry -- but if it happened it would be because all that cheep steel was not being used for obvious things, like the imperial army, but for other unexpected uses. Maybe arms and armour still had to be made the old fashioned way anyhow, so there was no immediate military advantage.

More likely, things were subtler. Things innovations can strangled long before their importance is clear. Imperial China had a vibrant merchant class, but it isn't the kind of place that is likely to tolerate the "disruptive innovation" which fuelled Britain's Industrial Revolution -- where a bunch of upstarts come and do things with unexpected things. Even modern China (or for that matter the modern United States) struggles with it.

Which is an example of the the euphemism treadmill. Secretary means secret-keeper and has built into it connotations at least of trust and often of power. Which is why top officials of many great ministries ion are called secretaries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Xgd7Cjm98

Yeah, that had occured to me. It just didn't really seem pertinent to this particular discussion. It struck me as a tangent, so I opted to not get into it.

Fair enough.

That's OK, we nowadays use icons that don't make sense to anyone at all. I mean how would you know that three horizontal lines was a "Hamburger menu", and if you do know that, why would you want a Hamburger?

Actually the icon looks like three menu items. It is a pretty good icon for signaling that it will open a menu. The hamburger nomenclature seems to be an ex pos facto name for something that rightfully should be called the menu icon.

> the icon looks like three menu items

It's a nondescript icon made of three horizontal bars, it looks like literally anything that comes in threes. My mom calls it the pancake button and my fourteen year-old nephew used to call it the button with something that looks like a fork but without a handle until he switched to the "meh" button once he became a nihilist (teenagers do that stuff sometimes). A menu with three items is very likely to be among the last things that crosses a non-techie's mind.

At this point it's been used enough that anyone with enough exposure to electronics knows what it does, but it's hardly a better choice than the "File" menu. The point of making something intuitive, as opposed to explicit (i.e. by using a symbol as opposed to spelling out) is kindda missed if you need to "well actually" it and explain why it means whatever it means.

I disagree. It took around two years of seeing hamburger menus before it clicked that it was a common symbol for a menu. Its getting worse and seems to be getting replaced by 3 vertical dots now.

I just think of the 3 vertical dots as vertical ellipsis. I often use vertical ellipsis when making a list that continues. e.g.

— History of Empire and Colonialism

— History of Religion and Society

— History of Race, Gender, and Power

  ⋮

— History of War and Society

So it naturally means "there is more stuff here" to me. YMMV

In your context it does make sense. As a menu button it doesn't (to me at least).

I can only speak for myself, but for me who grew up with C64, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, Linux, Windows XP more Linux etc that icon still didn't make sense until I got it explained.

Then again, the magnifykng glass icon for search didn't make sense either until I read the docs but at least back then people made docs and kept the UI stable enough so that it made sense to learn it.

I still remember fondly being good with OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) in a Microsoft Works.

The old days seemed so much more intuitive when there was a crappy low res icon with text underneath.

Not sure if you are sarcastic and in what way, but if I understand you correctly you think we are better off now.

I think we would be better off if we kept the best from both: the predictability and discoverability of the past with the niceness of today.

Why should we have to choose between nice and usable?

No I think that having a bit of descriptive text below an icon was far more useful than far prettier world of nicely rounded corners on hamburger menus that we have today.

It sounds like this guys employer has taken first step to inventing QA.

There's whole classes of highly paid engineers whose job is to do this. But they work for old fashioned, boring, companies.

The problem is QA tends to get to scripted. You need to exercise each corner of the product, thus you test A, B, C in that order - so you never find cases where testing C, A, B breaks, or any other permutation. (to be fair with any complexity it is impossible to test all permutations)

That's one part of it.

Another part is hiring a breed of test engineers who like breaking stuff and have a knack for it.

We call it exploratory testing.

> ... and watch as your page hit Slashdot...

And then fall over?

I miss the days of The Slashdot Effect[1]. Now it's the JS that makes my PC fall over.

[1] Come to think of it The Slashdot Effect would have been a good band name back in the '90s.

> Your code won't be pretty,

Depends on the algorithms that use that code. Two separate arrays is not a bad way to represent a vector-of-tuples. And so if you think of everything as a vectorised operation (and if that makes sense for your use case) then the code can be clean enough.

Efficiency-wise it depends on how the locality of reference falls out. There are cases where it's more cache-efficient to store the pairs next to each other, but again for big vectorised operations you might lose nothing by using two cache-ways instead of one.

Is it because people or so young, or that the pipeline to become a junior-but-still-responsible person goes through schools rather than something like an apprenticeship.

Both, I think. The field has grown in size, so that alone makes the young-to-middle-aged ratio skewed. Then, many middle-aged programmers drop out to become managers.

I totally agree that programming would be better taught by an apprenticeship model than the college model, and I say this as a person with two college degrees.