I know i know... it's a plot again, but i don't expect any better from your, or any other Gov anyway.
To be more precise, this is a plot by the military wing of your Government. Your government does do other things, but since they don't involve killing people or smashing things, they're not nearly as sexy and well-funded.
It always amuses me that folk of a certain American political persuasion who shout loudly that The Government (tm) is trampling their rights, pointing literal guns at their heads, and must be shut down because it's inefficient anyway... and then with the next breath shout even louder that the Military is super-efficient and trustworthy and the only guarantor of Liberty and must be given all the very biggest, very expensive guns (paid for by taxes) and point them at as many heads as they wish, in as much secrecy as they desire. Because Freedom.
This is what the NSA is SUPPOSED to do, what it was CREATED to do. There should not be any surprise at this.
"Aaarrrgh! Giant battle robots! Running amok in the street destroying all humans with their atomic gamma lasers! Help! Somebody stop them! Shut down the volcano island base where the evil madman is controlling them from!"
"Silly people, that's the killer robot's charter! It's what they're SUPPOSED to do! That's what they were CREATED to do! Why are you all so surprised?"
Glen Greenwald has continually made what are correct accusations and caused a great deal of difficulty in terms of illegal and unconstitutional military intelligence activities both within the military intelligence community and between the evil bastard and non-evil bastard communities. Now if he actually didn't have and wasn't releasing evidence to back up his claims that would be a non-story, but he does. He makes all these true and disturbing claims and then releases carefully assembled documentary evidence to back them up, and he's had all the evidence he's ever going to get since the very beginning so he's conducting a staged release to make sure Snowden's heroism isn't wasted.
Whatever you might think of Edward Snowden, Greenwald is a ground-breaking journalist who is far more concerned with serving the public interest than he is in contributing to the discussion about Miley Cyrus twerking. He should continue doing exactly what he's doing, since it's exposing the constant ongoing lies of the establishment and making the evil bastards squirm.
Also, how does one ``point'' a missile anywhere? (you mean they have the GPS coordinates of most interesting places already in the address book?).
Very cleverly, and I imagine they do have an 'address book' of sorts.
They have coordinates, yes. ICBM guidance systems way predate GPS and use inertial guidance based on very accurate gyroscopes, very accurate maps of Earth's gravitational field, and some of the first digital microcomputers which predated even the Apollo guidance computer. The first Minuteman one was 1962, and that was the third generation of US ICBMs. The first US ICBM, the Atlas-A, actually used radio guidance, which had the problem of being able to be jammed from the grond - if you're a James Bond fan, you'll remember this as being a major part of the villain's scheme in the first Bond movie, 1962's Dr No.
ICBM guidance systems basically are one of the secret projects which built the American computing industry as we know it. Far more than civilian NASA spaceflight, the ICBMs had the real military money and the political will to make advanced miniaturised real-time computing happen.
NSA doesn't have nuclear weapons aimed at NATO countries
Well, that they've told the public about. Fortunately, all the US nukes are under careful control at all times and the strategic targeting systems probably aren't run off anything involving a computer. And even if they were, the NSA aren't much into computers, don't have any experience writing viruses that penetrate command and control systems, and certainly don't have any access to computer networks that they shouldn't.
(the Kennedy administration) was responsible for initiating the NSA/moon project
Well, that certainly puts the Apollo project into perspective.
"Tranquillity Intercept Station here... the cable has landed... That's one... small... step for an analyst; one... giant leap... for signals intelligence..."
Being free means that there's nothing else, typically hereditary, environment or coercion, that dictates how we must behave.
I'm not sure that that's actually a good definition of freedom. Everyone has a heritage and an environment, and everyone is coerced in many overt and covert ways by the society and economy in which they must function. We're shaped very strongly by our natural and built environment as well. Doesn't mean we're not "free"; but on the other hand, we're not totally detached either.
Why does your honest man refuse to lie? Was he taught as a child that lying was wrong? Did his parents set an inspiring example by refusing to lie when it would be to their advantage? Are these not causative factors in his upbringing that reduced his freedom?
It is a good point that unpredictability of behaviour is not necessarily the same as freedom. But I think freedom can only be defined in relation to some context. This person or environment is not coercing my behaviour at this moment: but my behaviour, even though internalised as what I believe to be a self-selected code of honour, may still be the direct result of events in my history that I didn't choose to experience.
That does not preclude a general theorem prover from generating useful results on code about halting behavior (or any other behavior), it just can't answer every question about every piece of code, when given any possible input.
To be fair, neither can a human, given the same code.
Or are there indeed programs where a human programmer can intuit the behaviour of complex code without running it, but an algorithm can't?
Not entirely a silly question; after all, we still have human mathematicians and haven't managed to replace them all with Matlab scripts. What is it that the human mind is doing that our computers so far aren't?
Our actions either regress to prior causes and we are ultimately not responsible for them (you didn't control the circumstances of your birth or upbringing), or randomness inherent in a chaotic system; and we can't be held accountable for randomness either.
I'm not sure what precisely "can't be held responsible/accountable" means practically.
A white-tail spider might be a purely deterministic biological machine, but I'm still going to either squash it (or if I'm feeling merciful, catch it in a jar and toss it outside) if it comes into my house. Because I know its behaviour is likely to injure me; I don't have to "hold it responsible" for its behaviour in some moral/spiritual sense in order to extrapolate its future actions from its present state, and intervene.
A botnet on my computer certainly is a completely deterministic machine, with not a shred of agency or accountability, and I'm going to squash it even harder than the spider and with even less regrets. I don't consider it to have any kind of moral responsibility - but I know that it's a thing, that exists, that has an inside and an outside and that its inside includes certain predictable behaviours, and that those behaviours are hostile to my interests, and I'm going to recognise it and judge it not for its metaphysical stack-backtrace but for what it is right now, and what it will do.
Why do we need to have any idea of moral "accountability" before we can judge and act on another human's behaviour? Inferring their current state from their past actions, and predicting from that state their future actions, seems to be enough for all practical purposes.
Granted that humans do have the ability to change their behaviour toward other humans, which to me is the entire point of not being hash and hateful in our justice system; I'm in favour of forgiveness, but "they're not responsible for their actions" doesn't make any sense to me. Criminal justice is a clear-headed pragmatic matter of preventing people from doing bad things in the future - or becoming a cause of bad things in the future by way of inspiration - not metaphysical retroactive assignment of ultimate blame. Isn't it?
If we had no free will we would have no need for Governments, armies, laws, etc..
Conversely, if we had totally free will we would also have no need for Governments, armies and laws, since all of this machinery is based around one group of humans limiting and controlling the expressed will of others; if it were impossible to control another's will, nobody would ever try.
I think to me the question is not 'do we have free will' but 'how free is our will?' Because to me it's not a 0%/100% question. It's clear to me that we have some freedom of will. It's also clear to me that we do not have total freedom of will. We're not free to choose our race, birthplace, parenting; we're not free to choose many elements of the education which will form the contents of our thoughts. But neither are we completely controlled by external forces after our birth. From this limited freedom we seem to each evolve our own separate ideas and viewpoints, some more divergently than others. The paradox seems to lie in most formulations of the question wanting the answer to be 'yes' or 'no', when in reality it's somewhere in the middle.
"But is there really any difference between having free will and appearing to have free will?
Are you sure? There's a fairly simple thought experiment:
Is there a difference between being able to write a novel, and appearing to be able write a novel? That is, if the end product is actually a novel?
If you were given only a text file to read (and, eg, unlimited Google Books access to make sure that it wasn't trivially plagiarised), would you be able to tell the difference between an "actual novel" and an "apparent but not-actual novel" ? I mean, if the novel turned out to be better written than something by Dan Brown, and not obviously spambot gibberish?
At what point would you allow yourself to decide that "this is actually a novel, and not just something that appears to be identical to a novel, but isn't"?
Now extrapolate "novel" to "any behaviour". At what point does behaving identically to a person with free will start to become different from being a person with free will?
I for one don't understand how anyone can separate behaviour from being. If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and every experimental test performed on it returns 'isduck=true'...
I guess that's why he's keen on embarrassing the US rather than say Russia or China.
Well, since he worked for the USA and didn't work for Russa or China, I'd imagine the number of insider documents he has about the intelligence services of Russia and China is zero.
"But why doesn't Jeff Bezos talk about Google's operations, hmm? Why is it always Amazon that he wants us to think about? What is it that he has to hide? He's obviously a Google double agent, isn't he?"
"This ability would allow a quantum computer to decrypt many of the cryptographic systems in use today."
Nobody sane, no, but the NSA and GCHQ would love that. While lighting a cigar under the "no smoking next to the nuclear weapons" sign in the pool of suspicious green ooze at the abandoned military experiment base codenamed Icarus 13 that was formerly the Lovecraft House for Angry Psychic Orphans built on top of a desecrated Indian burial ground.
But surely it would fall off of the edge of the earth! Dragons!
Nah, dragons are okay for reconnaissance and town defense, but they're less cost-effective than ships for long-haul cargo transportation.You want leviathans, or krakens.
I never understood why Star Trek ships had to establish a "standard orbit" to begin with. They have enormous amounts of power available along with the magic warp field. So why couldn't they keep themselves suspended in one spot above a planet, regardless of gravity?
Especially since they can apparently move from one planet to the next in a system in a matter of minutes - even using 'impulse engines' - which if they were obeying standard Newtonian physics would take days at best if they accelerated at 1G all the way. Well, I suppose they could be accelerating at multi-G speeds, since they've got wacky warp drive inertial compensators, but at that point any pretense that 'impulse drive is just standard Newtonian chucking mass out the back' is long gone.
Yes government should get involved in the design of routers, and write laws about software code vetting.
Yes. They should.
That is, if you want your router to be fit for the purpose for which it was sold rather than be a dangerous toy that gets your home network rooted and your bank account drained, your files seized, your webcam activated and used to take compromising photos which are then used for extortion...
Plus, your personal network becomes my problem if it gets rooted and used to launch botnet attacks at me. Computer network security is a public security issue, and that's a valid role for government.
I would say that one of the most important thing in programming is to break down a problem into parts that are useful and easy to manage.
... given constantly changing and contradictory specifications, hardware, operating systems, programming platforms and data storage and transmission standards, on unmanaged, obsolete and malfunctioning endpoints, while preserving full round-trip data and binary code compatibility with legacy systems dating back thirty to fifty years, in an international multilingual ennvironment with competing national legal frameworks and data stewardship requirements, over an inherently hostile network, managed by uneducated users, while leaking no data or access rights in the face of organised crime and state-level espionage agencies.
And that's just to begin to meet basic functional square-one user requirements on today's Internet.
a lot of programming that is being done is meant to be powerful and meant to be built quickly. Running quickly and with low tolerance for faults is a little less important because very few things are mission critical.
... except for everything that is a potential security risk, which is everything that potentially faces the Internet, which in 2013 is everything.
Congratulations. You've just demonstrated in two sentences why the entire Internet ecosystem today is a huge gaping security disaster.
("But my script will never see the Internet! All our workstations are behind a firewall!" Let me introduce you to my little friend called "Bring Your Own Device". Did I say friend? I meant the kind of friend who likes hurting people. Good luck!)
But more to the point, the obsession with the declarative programming paradigm is one of the things holding programming back.
Um, are you sure you don't mean the imperative programming paradigm? Imperative is "do this, then do that" - ie, C - and doesn't scale to parallel. Declarative programming - "this is what I want, I don't care how it gets done" is precisely what modern programming languages don't do, and what I reckon we need more of. Especially if your work involves describing complex interlinked data sets with no particularly well-defined types (hello Internet! hello Semantic Web! hello just about everything on your basic workstation desktop except for the low-level graphics code in your 3D games)
IMO the high-water mark of declarative programming is Prolog embedded in Lisp - but show Prolog to the average C++/Javascript hacker and they'll look at you like you're from Mars. Where are my functions? Where's the curly brackets? What are these "predicate" things? What do you mean, it works backwards as well as forwards? Logic what?
We lost two generations of programming advancement when the AI Winter crashed the Lisp scene. Granted, the Scheme/Common Lisp civil wars didn't help. But we could have had much nicer things to program with than C++. We still could, if we cared.
Racket's semi-okay, I guess; it would be better if it didn't throw a whole bunch of multi-language complexity in your face right away, though. And unfortunately, its implementation of Prolog (actually Kanren) is Not Really Sufficient for the stuff I want to do, owing to massively too busy syntax. Ironically, the stuff I want to do which turns out to be really hard to do in most modern langauges is text adventures.
Slashdot Mirror
I know i know... it's a plot again, but i don't expect any better from your, or any other Gov anyway.
To be more precise, this is a plot by the military wing of your Government. Your government does do other things, but since they don't involve killing people or smashing things, they're not nearly as sexy and well-funded.
It always amuses me that folk of a certain American political persuasion who shout loudly that The Government (tm) is trampling their rights, pointing literal guns at their heads, and must be shut down because it's inefficient anyway... and then with the next breath shout even louder that the Military is super-efficient and trustworthy and the only guarantor of Liberty and must be given all the very biggest, very expensive guns (paid for by taxes) and point them at as many heads as they wish, in as much secrecy as they desire. Because Freedom.
This is what the NSA is SUPPOSED to do, what it was CREATED to do. There should not be any surprise at this.
"Aaarrrgh! Giant battle robots! Running amok in the street destroying all humans with their atomic gamma lasers! Help! Somebody stop them! Shut down the volcano island base where the evil madman is controlling them from!"
"Silly people, that's the killer robot's charter! It's what they're SUPPOSED to do! That's what they were CREATED to do! Why are you all so surprised?"
Glen Greenwald has continually made what are correct accusations and caused a great deal of difficulty in terms of illegal and unconstitutional military intelligence activities both within the military intelligence community and between the evil bastard and non-evil bastard communities. Now if he actually didn't have and wasn't releasing evidence to back up his claims that would be a non-story, but he does. He makes all these true and disturbing claims and then releases carefully assembled documentary evidence to back them up, and he's had all the evidence he's ever going to get since the very beginning so he's conducting a staged release to make sure Snowden's heroism isn't wasted.
Whatever you might think of Edward Snowden, Greenwald is a ground-breaking journalist who is far more concerned with serving the public interest than he is in contributing to the discussion about Miley Cyrus twerking. He should continue doing exactly what he's doing, since it's exposing the constant ongoing lies of the establishment and making the evil bastards squirm.
I agree completely!
However, when you have like 10k nukes, you couldn't point *all* of them at DC or NY...
Probably not the sub-launched ones, no, you have to put a submarine in position first. You probably could target all of the ICBMs at a single city though. It would waste a lot of warheads because of fratricide, but you would be very sure that it was melted by the time you were finished.
Also, how does one ``point'' a missile anywhere? (you mean they have the GPS coordinates of most interesting places already in the address book?).
Very cleverly, and I imagine they do have an 'address book' of sorts.
They have coordinates, yes. ICBM guidance systems way predate GPS and use inertial guidance based on very accurate gyroscopes, very accurate maps of Earth's gravitational field, and some of the first digital microcomputers which predated even the Apollo guidance computer. The first Minuteman one was 1962, and that was the third generation of US ICBMs. The first US ICBM, the Atlas-A, actually used radio guidance, which had the problem of being able to be jammed from the grond - if you're a James Bond fan, you'll remember this as being a major part of the villain's scheme in the first Bond movie, 1962's Dr No.
ICBM guidance systems basically are one of the secret projects which built the American computing industry as we know it. Far more than civilian NASA spaceflight, the ICBMs had the real military money and the political will to make advanced miniaturised real-time computing happen.
NSA doesn't have nuclear weapons aimed at NATO countries
Well, that they've told the public about. Fortunately, all the US nukes are under careful control at all times and the strategic targeting systems probably aren't run off anything involving a computer. And even if they were, the NSA aren't much into computers, don't have any experience writing viruses that penetrate command and control systems, and certainly don't have any access to computer networks that they shouldn't.
Yeah. Thanks for that bit of nightmare fuel.
> The most transparent administration ever.
What?! Uh... no.
Sure it's transparent. It's just one-way glass.
"Where are the hosting providers that make end-to-end encrypted email/web/VOIP/XMPP easy and automatic for all my clients?"
In Maryland... or Guantanamo Bay. Until you elect a government that decides privacy is legal.
(the Kennedy administration) was responsible for initiating the NSA/moon project
Well, that certainly puts the Apollo project into perspective.
"Tranquillity Intercept Station here... the cable has landed... That's one... small... step for an analyst; one... giant leap... for signals intelligence..."
"Beautiful, beautiful... magnificent information..."
Being free means that there's nothing else, typically hereditary, environment or coercion, that dictates how we must behave.
I'm not sure that that's actually a good definition of freedom. Everyone has a heritage and an environment, and everyone is coerced in many overt and covert ways by the society and economy in which they must function. We're shaped very strongly by our natural and built environment as well. Doesn't mean we're not "free"; but on the other hand, we're not totally detached either.
Why does your honest man refuse to lie? Was he taught as a child that lying was wrong? Did his parents set an inspiring example by refusing to lie when it would be to their advantage? Are these not causative factors in his upbringing that reduced his freedom?
It is a good point that unpredictability of behaviour is not necessarily the same as freedom. But I think freedom can only be defined in relation to some context. This person or environment is not coercing my behaviour at this moment: but my behaviour, even though internalised as what I believe to be a self-selected code of honour, may still be the direct result of events in my history that I didn't choose to experience.
That does not preclude a general theorem prover from generating useful results on code about halting behavior (or any other behavior), it just can't answer every question about every piece of code, when given any possible input.
To be fair, neither can a human, given the same code.
Or are there indeed programs where a human programmer can intuit the behaviour of complex code without running it, but an algorithm can't?
Not entirely a silly question; after all, we still have human mathematicians and haven't managed to replace them all with Matlab scripts. What is it that the human mind is doing that our computers so far aren't?
Our actions either regress to prior causes and we are ultimately not responsible for them (you didn't control the circumstances of your birth or upbringing), or randomness inherent in a chaotic system; and we can't be held accountable for randomness either.
I'm not sure what precisely "can't be held responsible/accountable" means practically.
A white-tail spider might be a purely deterministic biological machine, but I'm still going to either squash it (or if I'm feeling merciful, catch it in a jar and toss it outside) if it comes into my house. Because I know its behaviour is likely to injure me; I don't have to "hold it responsible" for its behaviour in some moral/spiritual sense in order to extrapolate its future actions from its present state, and intervene.
A botnet on my computer certainly is a completely deterministic machine, with not a shred of agency or accountability, and I'm going to squash it even harder than the spider and with even less regrets. I don't consider it to have any kind of moral responsibility - but I know that it's a thing, that exists, that has an inside and an outside and that its inside includes certain predictable behaviours, and that those behaviours are hostile to my interests, and I'm going to recognise it and judge it not for its metaphysical stack-backtrace but for what it is right now, and what it will do.
Why do we need to have any idea of moral "accountability" before we can judge and act on another human's behaviour? Inferring their current state from their past actions, and predicting from that state their future actions, seems to be enough for all practical purposes.
Granted that humans do have the ability to change their behaviour toward other humans, which to me is the entire point of not being hash and hateful in our justice system; I'm in favour of forgiveness, but "they're not responsible for their actions" doesn't make any sense to me. Criminal justice is a clear-headed pragmatic matter of preventing people from doing bad things in the future - or becoming a cause of bad things in the future by way of inspiration - not metaphysical retroactive assignment of ultimate blame. Isn't it?
Raise up your hand.
now.. did you do it?
Nope, and I didn't finish playing Bioshock either.
I win!
5. Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
My mother? Let me tell you about my mother...
If we had no free will we would have no need for Governments, armies, laws, etc..
Conversely, if we had totally free will we would also have no need for Governments, armies and laws, since all of this machinery is based around one group of humans limiting and controlling the expressed will of others; if it were impossible to control another's will, nobody would ever try.
I think to me the question is not 'do we have free will' but 'how free is our will?' Because to me it's not a 0%/100% question. It's clear to me that we have some freedom of will. It's also clear to me that we do not have total freedom of will. We're not free to choose our race, birthplace, parenting; we're not free to choose many elements of the education which will form the contents of our thoughts. But neither are we completely controlled by external forces after our birth. From this limited freedom we seem to each evolve our own separate ideas and viewpoints, some more divergently than others. The paradox seems to lie in most formulations of the question wanting the answer to be 'yes' or 'no', when in reality it's somewhere in the middle.
"But is there really any difference between having free will and appearing to have free will?
Are you sure? There's a fairly simple thought experiment:
Is there a difference between being able to write a novel, and appearing to be able write a novel? That is, if the end product is actually a novel?
If you were given only a text file to read (and, eg, unlimited Google Books access to make sure that it wasn't trivially plagiarised), would you be able to tell the difference between an "actual novel" and an "apparent but not-actual novel" ? I mean, if the novel turned out to be better written than something by Dan Brown, and not obviously spambot gibberish?
At what point would you allow yourself to decide that "this is actually a novel, and not just something that appears to be identical to a novel, but isn't"?
Now extrapolate "novel" to "any behaviour". At what point does behaving identically to a person with free will start to become different from being a person with free will?
I for one don't understand how anyone can separate behaviour from being. If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and every experimental test performed on it returns 'isduck=true'...
"How's that 'most transparent administration' in history thing workin' out fer ya?"
Well, it is transparent; just only in one direction...
I guess that's why he's keen on embarrassing the US rather than say Russia or China.
Well, since he worked for the USA and didn't work for Russa or China, I'd imagine the number of insider documents he has about the intelligence services of Russia and China is zero.
"But why doesn't Jeff Bezos talk about Google's operations, hmm? Why is it always Amazon that he wants us to think about? What is it that he has to hide? He's obviously a Google double agent, isn't he?"
Would anyone in their sane state want this:
"This ability would allow a quantum computer to decrypt many of the cryptographic systems in use today."
Nobody sane, no, but the NSA and GCHQ would love that. While lighting a cigar under the "no smoking next to the nuclear weapons" sign in the pool of suspicious green ooze at the abandoned military experiment base codenamed Icarus 13 that was formerly the Lovecraft House for Angry Psychic Orphans built on top of a desecrated Indian burial ground.
But surely it would fall off of the edge of the earth! Dragons!
Nah, dragons are okay for reconnaissance and town defense, but they're less cost-effective than ships for long-haul cargo transportation.You want leviathans, or krakens.
I never understood why Star Trek ships had to establish a "standard orbit" to begin with. They have enormous amounts of power available along with the magic warp field. So why couldn't they keep themselves suspended in one spot above a planet, regardless of gravity?
Especially since they can apparently move from one planet to the next in a system in a matter of minutes - even using 'impulse engines' - which if they were obeying standard Newtonian physics would take days at best if they accelerated at 1G all the way. Well, I suppose they could be accelerating at multi-G speeds, since they've got wacky warp drive inertial compensators, but at that point any pretense that 'impulse drive is just standard Newtonian chucking mass out the back' is long gone.
Yes government should get involved in the design of routers, and write laws about software code vetting.
Yes. They should.
That is, if you want your router to be fit for the purpose for which it was sold rather than be a dangerous toy that gets your home network rooted and your bank account drained, your files seized, your webcam activated and used to take compromising photos which are then used for extortion...
Plus, your personal network becomes my problem if it gets rooted and used to launch botnet attacks at me. Computer network security is a public security issue, and that's a valid role for government.
I would say that one of the most important thing in programming is to break down a problem into parts that are useful and easy to manage.
... given constantly changing and contradictory specifications, hardware, operating systems, programming platforms and data storage and transmission standards, on unmanaged, obsolete and malfunctioning endpoints, while preserving full round-trip data and binary code compatibility with legacy systems dating back thirty to fifty years, in an international multilingual ennvironment with competing national legal frameworks and data stewardship requirements, over an inherently hostile network, managed by uneducated users, while leaking no data or access rights in the face of organised crime and state-level espionage agencies.
And that's just to begin to meet basic functional square-one user requirements on today's Internet.
No pressure.
a lot of programming that is being done is meant to be powerful and meant to be built quickly. Running quickly and with low tolerance for faults is a little less important because very few things are mission critical.
... except for everything that is a potential security risk, which is everything that potentially faces the Internet, which in 2013 is everything.
Congratulations. You've just demonstrated in two sentences why the entire Internet ecosystem today is a huge gaping security disaster.
("But my script will never see the Internet! All our workstations are behind a firewall!" Let me introduce you to my little friend called "Bring Your Own Device". Did I say friend? I meant the kind of friend who likes hurting people. Good luck!)
But more to the point, the obsession with the declarative programming paradigm is one of the things holding programming back.
Um, are you sure you don't mean the imperative programming paradigm? Imperative is "do this, then do that" - ie, C - and doesn't scale to parallel. Declarative programming - "this is what I want, I don't care how it gets done" is precisely what modern programming languages don't do, and what I reckon we need more of. Especially if your work involves describing complex interlinked data sets with no particularly well-defined types (hello Internet! hello Semantic Web! hello just about everything on your basic workstation desktop except for the low-level graphics code in your 3D games)
IMO the high-water mark of declarative programming is Prolog embedded in Lisp - but show Prolog to the average C++/Javascript hacker and they'll look at you like you're from Mars. Where are my functions? Where's the curly brackets? What are these "predicate" things? What do you mean, it works backwards as well as forwards? Logic what?
We lost two generations of programming advancement when the AI Winter crashed the Lisp scene. Granted, the Scheme/Common Lisp civil wars didn't help. But we could have had much nicer things to program with than C++. We still could, if we cared.
Racket's semi-okay, I guess; it would be better if it didn't throw a whole bunch of multi-language complexity in your face right away, though. And unfortunately, its implementation of Prolog (actually Kanren) is Not Really Sufficient for the stuff I want to do, owing to massively too busy syntax. Ironically, the stuff I want to do which turns out to be really hard to do in most modern langauges is text adventures.
And no, I'm not interested in arguing semantics.
Oh, so you're just arguing syntax then?
(Sir Tim Berners-Lee kills a SPARQL query whenever someone uses the word "semantic" to mean "lacking information content". Luckily, no-one notices.)