Focusing on happiness, what if the computer were just endlessly working on making humans happy? Would that be any better?

You might end up with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isrd7E5nzIQ

Or perhaps something much, much worse like electronic crack.

You could argue that we've already achieved that: http://nypost.com/2016/08/27/its-digital-heroin-how-screens-...

Humans are flexible and adaptable. We can take any good fortune and make it ours while feeling entitled about it. In one generation or two, the new normal will be old. I think my parent's generation has seen a more dramatic raise in their conditions of life than I ever will (going from countryside to the city, in the period around 1970's). My grandma's never had a water closet in their life and raised water by the bucket from the well, and yet lived well above 80 years old, yet I now use a Japanese washlet - spoiled rotten, that's what I am by her standards. I don't even have to wipe my own damn ass.

> Interviewer: How long have you been doing it? > Carpenter: Ten years.

Now if that were 20 years, instead of the rock it would be a complex, slow hammering machine that employed tumbled-smooth colored rocks.

Those rocks would pulled from a shared quarry at the point in time when they were needed.

The new way to provide such rocks would be to order a large truck carrying the rock hammering machine and a set of subcontractors you'd previously had to train by showing them videos on an old VHS tape player. However, the truck would still need to be loaded after each materialization for the job. The truck usually would contain the same supplies, but sometimes some of the rocks would be replaced by scorpions.

Whether or not to use the truck at a job and which trucking company would be a point of debate. Google Building Co. would make the best fleets of trucks with laser targeting systems that made sense to the highly-intelligent, fluffy bears that worked there. Microsoft Building Co. also had two versions of trucks: the old truck that was much slower but worked with existing technology and the new truck which worked if you used a Danish truck and better smaller rocks that few people could find. All of their workers swore like sailors. A subcontracting team all wearing red baseball caps worked with both companies, but supplied their own equipment that was all transparent, and you could either pay for it or not, depending on whether or not you got it from someone else they gave it to.

...there was something about nails, but I forget.

> I think that good languages offer features that make your code better, not let you write it faster.

And great languages let you do both.

And what do you define as a great language?

Language greatness is pretty subjective and task specific. There are some languages I will never declare great (i.e. PHP, JavaScript, Ruby), but others could be great for different tasks..

> Language greatness is pretty subjective and task specific. There are some languages I will never declare great

If greatness is subjective AND task specific, then the languages you will never declare great could be considered great by others for the tasks they perform. And by your own admission if they were great subjectively AND for a particular task, that would make those languages great. But, you still claim that you would never declare them great?