If you believe in free will, I'd be very interested to know your beliefs as to whence it derives. If the universe is bound by a set of consistent physical laws governing the behaviour of all energy/matter, then every interaction is predetermined by the combination of those laws and whatever the initial state was. Free will therefore requires a supernatural component that is not subject to those laws and processes. Even at a more macro level, every decision you make is necessarily based on a combination of genetics and the contents of your memory, i.e. the sum of your experiences, and the interaction between those elements.
What we like to call free will is just the deterministic result of processes to complex to be understood, modelled or predicted.
> If the universe is bound by a set of consistent physical laws governing the behaviour of all energy/matter, then every interaction is predetermined by the combination of those laws and whatever the initial state was.
Quantum theory disproves this thesis, and quantum theory is the best-confirmed of any current scientific theories, i.e. it's very likely to reflect a basic truth about reality. Quantum theory shows that, even though physical laws, and cause/effect relationships, still exist, outcomes aren't predetermined -- there is more than enough indeterminacy in outcomes to justify an argument for free will.
Someone might argue that, if quantum probability only allows a certain number of possible outcomes and one of those outcomes will be selected randomly, therefore free will is disproven by that essentially mathematical process. But if there are enough such outcomes in a timeline, the real difference between many stochastic quantum picks and what most people think of as free will, may seem academic.
> What we like to call free will is just the deterministic result of processes to complex to be understood, modelled or predicted.
That may be true, but it cuts both ways. It can be used to argue for a purely mechanistic unpredictability with no involvement for conscious agents, but it can be used to argue for the opposite case (conscious choices, "free will") with equal justice. And we might never know which is true.
One could imagine the concept recurring outward, since time has no meaning. Maybe when egg has lived all the lives he moves to the next level and finds that he was both egg and the "god", teaching himself.
I make Zudio (http://zud.io), a tool for managing Azure storage, which uses Azure storage for its own system data. I've made it a goal since day one of developing it that I wouldn't use any other tool, and I've successfully stuck to that. It's been an excellent way to drive the development forward.
And extremely narrow in scope, being all web centric.
And what's with the who's who of poorly designed technologies?
if I had to pick a list of languages and technologies with the most annoying design deficiencies, it would be php, js, mysql, vbscript, asp. Web development still is a stinking pile of languages, but at least classic asp/vbscript and most php is gone, right?
PHP isn't even remotely gone. Between one of the largest sites in the world (Facebook) and the most popular blogging platform (Wordpress) not to mention a countless number of little (and not so little) sites, PHP is stronger than ever.
If anything, I expect PHP's arc to look more like JavaScript than Perl.
There is Hadoop, Microsoft have been pursuing it aggressively recently.
SciPy type stuff is best handled using F#, which also works on Mono, and has some features that I haven't seen in any other languages (e.g. Type Providers).
There are multiple .NET web frameworks, including Microsoft's own ASP.NET MVC and Web API, but also OSS efforts like FubuMVC, Nancy, ServiceStack, Simple.Web and more, most of which work as well on Mono as on MS .NET.
As you say, the Node story on Windows has improved lately, and most current languages work as well on Windows as on any other platform.
C# itself is probably second only to JavaScript in terms of cross-platform development: Xamarin for Mac and mobile; Mono for Linux (yes, it's incomplete, but Linux people should be used to that); Unity for game development across consoles, mobile devices, web and traditional PCs. By "cross-platform" I don't necessarily mean write-once-run-everywhere, which results in lowest common denominator dreck anyway, but the ability to reuse your skills and some code in many different environments and domains.
That "feature" would be better with an explicit language construct such as *args or params args[], though. As with so many complaints about JavaScript, it's the default behaviour that is a problem.
I'd say it's worse than a default behavior, since there's no sane way to reverse the default. Are explicit arg list checks really an option, when you want to opt out of the default? I'd say that's not practical at all -- so it's really worse, as there's no practical opt out of this.
What we like to call free will is just the deterministic result of processes to complex to be understood, modelled or predicted.