What have the Romans ever done for us

You know when I hear a people speaking like this, I can't help but think about that scene from "The Life of Brian" where the rhetorical question of "What have the Romans ever done for us?!" ( [this video] ) It's terribly simplistic to look only at industrialization problems and completely neglect to acknowledge the upsides. Is there pollution and would I like there to be less, sure. Having said that would I want to give up the safety, food security, medical advances, conveniences, etc. that make life worthwhile so that I could live in pristine, untouched nature? Not a chance. I've life is substantially better because I live in an industrialized society and I'll take the pollution so long as it comes with all the good in my life.

Parasitic HFT that doesn't actually provide liquidity is a consequence of rules that are designed to provide liquidity. Think of what you would "expect" if things were working right. Am I going to try to sell something at the exact moment a human needs to buy? No, I'm going to sell to a dealer who will hold it for a bit and then sell to a human who wants to buy. The dealer is purely algorithmic, so he may as well be replaced by a computer. From the article "On the positive side of electronic trading, the panel said, liquidity has improved, transaction costs are lower, and market efficiency is generally better." Relevant Monty Python: [this video]

> So what's new? What do you really win with Clojure other than better libraries and community? Not much. Community and libraries are of outmost importance in picking a language. So, your "what do you really win other than those", reminds me of "what the Romans ever did for us" Monty Python skitch ( [this video] ). > Oh and the uh...concurrency primitives? They're a canard. They're neat, they're designed excellently (being that it's Rich Hickey), but they're just not as impactful as other things are these days. If single-node/instance performance was important, you wouldn't be able to do it on the JVM. If scalability is important, shared memory on a single node is irrelevant and it becomes a matter of implementing a partition tolerant database. The concurrency primitives would've been more important in an alternate universe where we didn't use databases/data stores/filesystems for state management and synchronization and instead did Smalltalk stateful servers. A really bizarre way to look at things. You've basically taken too extremes and arbitrarily declared that there is nothing of importance in between. No, single-node/instance performance can BOTH be important AND achieved on the JVM. It's all a matter of degree and other tradeoffs. In the world we live in, concurrency in a single instance is important. Not everybody has huge multi-instance problems, and even those that do would like to be able to use less instances for their loads. > You want to win the Lisp-community-at-larg