I try to learn the basics of new programming language regularly and write a small lisp alike interpreter in it and give myself a maximum of 2 days working on it. It covers things like string handling, regexp, recursion, lambdas, garbage collection, ... and run them through a tiny test suite.
In Python and JS, it was easy to do it and the code was still very readable. In C++, the language I earn my money from, I had a bug I was not able to fix within the given time frame, happening just with gcc not clang, assuming some undefined behavior. In C, I was able to add my own garbage collector with muss less work than I expected ... but
Nim really impressed me, it really felt almost like I wrote it in Python, but an executable which run on its own and being quite a bit faster.
Working mostly in the embedded world, where ecosystem matters somewhat less. If any employee ever would give me a chance to choose a language myself I would definitely try to write a first prototype in Nim.
There are several reasons. I believe, many would acknowledge that it absolutely has good sides. But there are worrysome sides. As I life at the moment in Switzerland I know a little bit about the discussion there:
The implementation of an E-ID could just not good. In Switzerland people voted against E-ID already once and I believe now everyone agrees nowadays that it would have been an bad bad implementation back then (too much reliance on external companies). The same was true e.g. for Covid Certificates. The different implementations around Europe had different qualities and e.g. Switzerland ended up with one of the better (or maybe best) ones, where the identity of people were protected.
Let's just take the example of voting. It is already hard to explain to people that voting works as intended. Look e.g. at the US were I've the impression people do not trust regular voting anymore, despite having people from other countries checking if voting works correctly in the US. But overall it is a system almost everyone is able to understand. But the moment you bring cryptography into the game it's over. 99% will never ever understand why they should trust this. And honestly I feel with them. There are a lot of software people here and we all know how awful our whole industry cares about security overall and how critical software components depend sometimes on a few people. At least the whole implementation should be open source, everything else should not be tolerable.
What I have the impression most people fear, is not the E-ID itself, it is how it will be misused. Suddenly websites will now request verification for dubious reasons. While it is not the case with a regular ID, it will be trivial to do so in the future. The same with mass surveillance, it was not practical before internet, now it is, so governments do it. I think here comes one of the main arguments against it people would bring up, there is no simple instrument for people how they can fight back in case they dont like to identify with their E-ID.
To some degree there is mistrust in government (in Switzerland less then in Europe I believe) for very valid reasons. But still e.g. in Switzerland they had records of many people years ago. After the whole topic came to the surface it was a debacle and new laws were created to explicitly forbid this. E.g. in Switzerland it is not allowed by law to just store some information because are from the left-wing or right-wing (just regular left-wing/right-wing, not extremist), just as one example of something simple. Despite of this government still started to do again. Several newspaper requested this information, which now has to given out, and found it, despite being against the law, the government is doing it again. This kind of thing you can find for other European countries as well, and for the US I assume I don't even have to start.
Then what about people without Internet? At the 38C3 in germany last year was a presentation about this topic (Don't remember the full name, just that is is somehwere on https://media.ccc.de/c/38c3): that we always think it is just the old people, but this is not true.
Sure you could argue, that people give away they privacy willingly anyway, but I'm not sure if this a good reason to argue against all the suspicious some people have.
At least in Switzerland I believe, if they just slightly would change the law it would benefit everyone. E.g. that in case an internet page expects an E-ID, that first it needs to through (a probably costly) evaluation what data is really, really needed, with many privacy experts at the table, to always reduce it to the absolut minimum (the E-ID has this feature to be even better than an ID regarding this). Additionally that there must be e.g. always a possibility to somehow call and have a possibility to do it without E-ID.
You can implement any of this without digital ID. Are there any real privacy concerns in Estonia after their digital citizenship? These arguments could be made against passports/driving licenses. It just doesn't seem like real legitimate concerns. Governments already have multiple databases on who you are. If digital ID unlocks more possibilities I am all for it - there is unbelievable amounts of missed opportunities in Government. One example - using a pen tablet to sign your name with the job centre to 'prove' who you are: utterly ridiculous!
On the other side of the spectrum (compared what other have written) are e.g. constants in control loops. This could e.g. be a PID controller and the values for P, I and D, may have been chosen very carefully. Changing them slightly may render the application useless.
I'm not from the US. But in Europe nothing of this must be expensive. I'm almost 40 and lived almost always in shared flats (ca. 2500€ year). Often we got a very old cheap farmhouse half an hour away from a bigger town, which is still accessible by public transportation. Food I sometimes buy and sometimes we get it from places where they would throw it away. Also planting our own stuff. Sure you have to sometimes eat zucchini for a week, or now pumpkin for several weeks :D but you get creative. While travelling I used internet pages like Couchsurfing & HelpX and many others. Some months I spent less than 50€. I met a lot of amazing people on the way which lead to a lot of very nice opportunities. What I learned this way that it is trivial for me to find a place to sleep everywhere on the world. People are helpful and when you help them, they often give you new opportunities, at least that was almost always the case for me. Overall the most expensive things for me is the yearly health care (ca. 3500€). When I work, normally, for one year, this allows me quite easily live for 3-4 years. Knowing this gives me also quite some peace. The good thing is I met people abroad, which also realized that travelling in a more simple fashion could really be very cheap and gave up their job, started to travel around. So far several Couchsurfing couples visited me back from countries which are not really known to make the average person rich (an the couples I met, by no means were). I don't claim I figured out live, but it is definitely possible to life differently.
I ordered several times from shenzhen2u. I had a few questions and some issues at first with their store. I always got a friendly (and useful) answer within 24 hours. Actually better answers, than what I got in Europe (some of them very expensive in comparison). Quality for my requirements was always better than expected. E.g. I made several boards for a Raspberry Pi and the through holes were all fine (on all boards). I had zero issues to put them on top of the 2 x 20 header of the Raspberry Pi.
I'm currently using Cyanogenmod (on a Samsung Note 3) but have a problems where I really consider to switch back to the stock ROM:
- Battery life is reduced quite much, I spent quite some time finding the root cause with BatterBatteryStat, but in the end, it are just the core services which seem to use more power, there is no app in the background. With Cyanogenmod it discharges in the night for ca. 30% without doing anything and disable WLAN. When I still had the stock ROM I was out in the mountains for 5 days and could take almost 400 photos without recharging. SlimROM was much better in this regard, but they didn't had the PrivacyGuard and so far do not support the Note 3 on their newer ROMs.
- I tried to avoid Google Play, unfortunately a few apps depend on it (especially all the ones using Google Map). But my main problem is more that I've no idea how dangerous alternatives like Aptoide are. I accidentally downloaded some apps which were already fully unlocked, while only available for money on Google Play. I found a Java Program (http://www.onyxbits.de/raccoon) to download apps through a Google Account on your PC and then transfer it onto your phone, but this is somewhat cumbersome.
I try to learn the basics of new programming language regularly and write a small lisp alike interpreter in it and give myself a maximum of 2 days working on it. It covers things like string handling, regexp, recursion, lambdas, garbage collection, ... and run them through a tiny test suite.
In Python and JS, it was easy to do it and the code was still very readable. In C++, the language I earn my money from, I had a bug I was not able to fix within the given time frame, happening just with gcc not clang, assuming some undefined behavior. In C, I was able to add my own garbage collector with muss less work than I expected ... but
Nim really impressed me, it really felt almost like I wrote it in Python, but an executable which run on its own and being quite a bit faster.
Working mostly in the embedded world, where ecosystem matters somewhat less. If any employee ever would give me a chance to choose a language myself I would definitely try to write a first prototype in Nim.