Apparently the JS name was selected and announced in partnership with Sun from the very beginning, and Sun had the copyright over both Java and JapaScript up until the acquisition by Oracle. I had no idea, but that makes perfect sense.
I've never understood the hatred for Teams. I don't particularly like Slack, and Teams (from my limited experience using it) doesn't seem that much worse.
I don't know; I haven't caught up on the research over the past decade. But it's worth noting that this body of evidence is from before the surge in popularity of strongly typed languages such as Swift, Rust, and TypeScript. In particular, mainstream "statically typed" languages still had null values rather than Option or Maybe.
Partly because it's from 2014, so the modern static typing renaissance was barely starting (TypeScript was only two years old; Rust hadn't hit 1.0; Swift was mere months old). And partly because true evidence-based software research is very difficult (how can you possibly measure the impact of a programming language on a large-scale project without having different teams write the same project in different languages?) and it's rarely even attempted.
No, because the thing they are naming is "The Github Dictionary"; they're not applying scare-quotes to the word "dictionary" implying that what they've written is not really a "dictionary".
"Scare quotes" definitely precede Austin Powers, though that may have spurred a rise in popularity of the usage. (Also, "trashy people never saw Austin Powers" is honestly a pretty weird statement, IMO.)
That said, in this case, arguably the quotes are appropriate, because "the github dictionary" isn't something that happened (i.e. a headline), but a thing they've made up.
Most of those comments are actually just random people arguing about the merits of the experiment, not continued discussion with the bot.
Also, the bot is supposed to be able to run builds to verify its work, but is currently prevented from doing so by a firewall rule they're trying to fix, so its feedback is limited to what the comments provide. Humans wouldn't do great in that scenario either. (Not to say the AI is doing "great" here, just that we're not actually seeing the best-case scenario yet.)
I'm addressing the bit that I quoted, saying that an interpreted language "must" have valid semantics for all code. I'm not specifically addressing whether or not JavaScript is right in this particular case of min().
...but also, what are you talking about? Python throws a type error if you call min() with no argument.
Definitely not gonna defend Microsoft's naming, let alone their versioning!