The planet may disagree though.

A plumber can make art while plumbing. A truck driver can make art while driving. Yet that is not the first purpose of their jobs. Hence, in general, a truck driver is not an artist. Of course, nothing prevents a truck driver from being an artist.

Same for engineering (software here). Our job is to build / maintain systems. Not to create art. Now, we can create art in the process, of course, just like everyone else. But no, engineering is not art by any stretch of the imagination.

Art: the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

Engineering is an activity that has a practical goal: Build a plane, make a website, make this piece of code scale. Not activities primarily appreciated for their beauty or emotional power.

If your program will be up for days (think a server, a browser, etc...), the startup time can easily become negligible.

Well, each thread uses its own buffer, so there is no issue, is there ? They can then switch buffers when they feel the need to.

Engineering is inherently a creative job, so is researcher, and many others. That does not make it art.

Java is slow to start, because the JVM is a beast that takes its sweet time to get up to speed. After this hit, the type of code you are talking about will be about 5 to 10 % slower, which might be acceptable or not depending of your requirements and the value you put in all that Java provides and C does not.

The reason so few games are written in Java is that the GUI layer is not efficient to optimize your UI down to your graphic chipset *and* the fact that a full GC will stop the world fr a split second and you have no control over it. So, a game needs fluid interface which the GC doesn't allow and lightning fast graphics performance which java is not equipped for. The general CPU performance of Java is not at all an issue there.

Rust do not allow you to share a buffer between two threads for example. That might be one optimization that the C code does and the Rust implementation *cannot* do. It might not just be the ASM produced by the compiler.

That's one example of course.

Programming is not an art, it's engineering. Decades of C programming has shown that *no* programmer at all is immune to bugs that are way too easy to do naturally when you can cast a pointer to an int and do whatever the fuck you want with it. True, it allows for insane optimization, but then you're subject to buffer overflows and other issues that come naturally with this lax attitude.

This problem was solved decades ago by Java and the like. When your pointers are a first class citizen and not a glorified int, it becomes trivial to build safeguards in. Those programming languages came with GCs which are a pain to deal with on their own, but they bring value to the table.

Rust goes one step further by preventing most threading issues. And don't tell me people could just do it themselves. In that case, just go back to code in binary and let us programmers in peace. After all, C bring nothing to the table that you cannot do in ASM.

But in reality, one of the motivation for Rust was the fact that in all browsers rendering engines, and all UIs for that matter, there is *one* UI thread whose job it is to update the UI state. Why one? Because having more than one is a fucking nightmare and to this day, no one company/group/developer has succeeded in building a multi threaded rendering engine. Which is a pity since virtually all computers sold today (phones included) have plenty of cores that can do nothing to speed up your UI.

Rust solves this complexity and there is now a browser that has a multi threaded rendering engine: Servo. It is still not in a state where it is usable, if only because Mozilla dumped it in 2020, after having invested so heavily in Rust for this very purpose. The ways of Mozilla are truly obscure to me these days.

Your argument amounts to say that adding a guard rail to this path right next to a cliff provides nothing but a way for dumb people not to fall off the cliff. While true in a way, it also provide protection for *everyone*.

France is fine. It's Portugal and Spain whose grid failed and a tiny bit of France is usually powered by it. RTE (the french grid operator) quickly diverted some power to this tiny bit and they got back up. France is even powering a bit of Spain right now.

Everything Trump has done so far has a very slim chance of putting the U.S. in a better position—especially in the mid or long term.

It's true that no one has a crystal ball, but history does offer insights into strategies and their likely outcomes. Antagonizing everyone has never been a winning strategy. Tariffs have consistently led to the same results, time and time again, in every country.

Discussing detailed war plans on Signal with a journalist doesn’t exactly show great care for top secret matters.

If only he had studied basic geopolitics or Economics 101. As it stands, all of this reveals a level of amateurism that is truly breathtaking.

This does not make China an untrustworthy trade partner. They reacted to an unprovoked attack by Trump and that's a reasonable response.

What Trump did since the beginning of his 2nd term however turned the USA into one. Unless there is no other choice, everyone is going to look elsewhere for imports. That is bound to cut deep into the US's economy. But anyone with half a brain can understand that. Too bad the orange goon doesn't have it.

And pragmatic. They don't bow to the orange clown like so many other countries. They hold their ground.

Not necessarily. Having decent healthcare can prevent the thing that is going to kill you earlier, not matter how excellent your critical healthcare system.

As an example, Not getting vaccinated can get you killed earlier, no matter how good your E.R. is.