Yeah, that's what I’m trying to say, because most definitions say it’s related to the environment. That’s why we sometimes look back at people and say they were “ahead of their time”, meaning that we appreciate their insight more today than their peers did back then. So they didn’t appear very intelligent back then but today we think of them as highly intelligent.

I believe the definition of intelligence changes all the time. Some say it’s the ability to adapt to the environment, but the environment changes all the time. During World War I and II computers were people good at doing lots of mental math calculations quickly. It was a fairly mechanical skill which didn’t exactly advance the field of mathematics, but they could earn a good salary with that skill. It was an aid in their specific environment. Someone who we would call a savant today would be really useful back then, but they are not useful anymore because today we have computers which are machines. I think the more advanced we become the more it will be all about the deepest of deep thoughts like “P vs NP”. So quality thoughts and not quantity will be important. And I think creativity is related to this and it doesn’t get enough attention because it’s even more difficult to measure than traditional intelligence because you can’t test it with multiple choice. What uses can you think of for a sock? Foot wear, glove, water filter, weapon (if a stone is inside), rope (if tied together), fishing line (if unravelled), purse, mask (if holes cut in), the list goes on. How do you evaluate such a list? It’s very fluffy stuff (no pun intended). If the power goes off permanently tomorrow, who will be the intelligent ones if not those who can build tools, hunt, trap, build shelters and recognize patterns in plant and animal behaviour? Not much use for “P vs NP” anymore…

Agreed. And Niklaus Wirth is the man. Look at the Oberon OS and language from 1985! KISS to the max. I think OOP and Functional can co-exist - like in Scala? For me the next paradigm would be "language oriented programming" / "domain specific languages". Levels of re-use (keeping the code to the minimum): Datatype Function OOP (inheritance, dynamic binding, etc) domain specific language

Why do boolean variables exist? To store and retrieve boolean expressions (TRUTH values). They were invented SO THAT we can write code like

if (X)

otherwise we could just as well remove the boolean type and work with integer flags like

if (X==1)

This was one of the issues people had with C. No proper boolean type. But now we have a proper boolean type so don't reduce it to a "flag value" that needs to be compared to something to find the truth. It holds the truth all on its own. That's its job.

CDP1802 wrote:

t is at least the same way you compare any other variable (if (x == 0), so why not if (flag == true)?

My reasoning is you could take any boolean expression, and instead of writing

if (X)

you could write

if (X==true)

to make it really clear. But you could then also write

if ((X==true)==true)

to make it really really clear. So I'm thinking let's drop all implied trailing "==true"'s in a mental tail call optimization. ;)