Well, that's fair; first-class support for running an actual Linux kernel, with the containerization support that implies, is one of the reasons I prefer Windows with WSL as a dev environment when using Docker (at least, in companies where the IT team won't just let you run native Linux).

Oh, you just mean he believes that's the future, not that he agrees with it or thinks it's a good thing.

Maybe? But also, maybe not? ChromeOS is not just for "people who are already interested in Linux." It's true that only techies are likely to care about ChromeOS vs some hypothetical non-Google OS/distro, but the vendors are techies, so if a vendor wanted to sell a Chromebook-like product without involving Google, they'd presumably be interested in an OS/distro like the one the article is talking about.

Definitely not gonna defend Microsoft's naming, let alone their versioning!

Oracle? Oracle owns Java, not JavaScript.

Edit: mea culpa! Sun owned both!

Oh, that makes much more sense; thanks.

It's valid usage if you go waaay back, i.e. centuries. You also see it in some late 19th/early 20th century newsprint and ads.

Without one, the run time system, must assign some semantics to the source code, no matter how erroneous it is.

That's just not true; as the comment above points out, Python also has no separate compilation step and yet it did not adopt this philosophy. Interpeted languages were common before JavaScript; in fact, most LISP variants are interpreted, and LISP is older than C.

Moreover, even JavaScript does sometimes throw errors, because sometimes code is simply not valid syntactically, or has no valid semantics even in a language as permissive as JavaScript.

So Eich et al. absolutely could have made more things invalid, despite the risk that end-users would see the resulting error.

So...like an old fashioned camera iris?

The original claim wasn't that you can't implement monads in C++, it was that compiler support is needed for "good" sum types. Unless I'm misreading, you brought monads into it. And they're not totally orthogonal: sum types are a very good way to implement monads.