miniblog.

Is there any relationship between language adoption and the size of its standard library? These days it seems completely orthogonal, but early Java adopters spoke highly of the collections library compared with C++. Maybe it's the widespread availability of package managers?

The US Navy is exploring ships that are more highly automated. The crew is smaller, and their roles are generalist problem solvers.

Yes, highly optimising compilers can be less predictable. But given the choice between two compilers, where one is easier to reason about but the other produces faster overall code, I'd pick the latter every time.