Of course the most productive comment is the least upvoted one. EDIT: After thinking about it, maybe it's best to add an explanation to bare links.

Are you beginning to see things more clearly now?

It's double speak. The translation is "We are evil and if you say something about what you see, we will silence you.".

Interesting, that definitely makes sense!

Actually, I like encapsulating global state in a structured and documented construct. But I guess I could see Java developers going overboard with abstraction in an imperative language.

I've recently come to appreciate the "refactor the code while you write it" and "keep possible future changes in mind" ideas more and more. I think it really increases the probability that the system can live on instead of becoming obsolete.

Actually one of the few languages you can learn in its completeness in less than a day, so I wouldn't really say it's "hard to understand". More like hard to read and understands programs written in it.

Das ist Doppelsprech für "enorme Auswirkungen auf die Stabilität meiner Machtposition".

Man I'd love for that to catch on, mostly so it's easier to learn. Kids get confused by the order all the time. It's even shorter in some cases.

Also, the reverse order makes dictating phone numbers such a pain.

Sure, it's advantageous in the short-term. I think this is where we misunderstand each other. What I'm trying to say is that under normal circumstances, individuals aren't maximizing their output. They are just living as part of the community, following the unwritten rules and benefiting from that. (In the prisoner's dilemma, this would be choice A).

If this is how everyone would act in their daily life, you would see crime, theft and abuse on an unimaginable level. No, people don't always do what benefits them "at every individual point". We are social creatures, acting as a community where the individuals benefit from working together. Although this has been successfully undermined by capitalism and other hierarchies.

This whole concept is also called, the Prisoner's Dilemma, one of my favorite thought experiments because it shows how being rational can result in everyone being worse off.

Yes. The "tragedy of the commons" is a myth.

Without any limits, individual cattle owners have an incentive to overgraze the land, destroying its value to everybody.

This is factually false, because the land will be destroyed and individuals don't benefit, not even in the short term. Commons work great (see open source software), but capitalism and power structures abuse and destroy them for short-term profit.