Wadler's Blog

CUFP tutorials announced: Haskell (by Jeremy Gibbons and Simon Marlow), F# (by Tomas Petricek), Scala, and more!

Hi Philip,

Your presentation Faith, Evolution, and Programming Languages, published on Aug 9, 2012 and recorded at QCon London 2012 has generated 10,198 page views so far. Congratulations!  Roxan Bacila, Community Contributions Facilitator. 

Handy information for the Edinburgh Festivals, from XKCD.  I give 4 1/2 stars to Coalition, and four stars to Tubular Bells for Two, Blues!, and The Bongo Club.

Jonathan Ben-Artzi, a mathematician at Cambridge University, refusenik, and nephew of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, argues in an interview in favour of classifying Israeli attitudes towards Palestinians as apartheid.

You studied at Brown University. I’m sure you’re familiar with our political discourse here in the United States. Comparing Israeli policies toward the Palestinians with apartheid in South Africa inevitably invites charges of anti-Semitism and extremism.

It has always seemed like a correct analogy to me, in that Israel is facing demographic pressures, and has set up a quasi state with no real sovereignty. They’re pretending that that quasi state is in fact independent. In apartheid South Africa these were called Bantustans.

[Update: My thanks to Ohad Kammar for pointing out I misread the above: the second paragraph is not Ben-Artzi's answer, but part of the interviewer's question, which makes the view expressed of considerably less interest. My apologies for the error.]