I treated Basic with contempt in early days. Baffled by why people used VB6 when Delphi was so much more regular and productive. However, when I first saw VB, I was impressed - at last BASIC as a real programming language, However, there was also the wonderful C# that, to me, "looked like Java and smelled like Delphi".

It is ok for development work apart from the reduced organisational flexibility of the start screen (ok on a laptop or pad in order to pretend to be an ipad, but useless for a development desktop).

The teacher was not embarrassed but shocked that any student could be so wrong. The division MUST be carried out before the subtraction. 230 – 220 × 0.5 = 230 – 110 = 120. Try it in any scientific calculator or programming language. You are alone (I hope) in thinking the answer is 5. Are you perhaps joking?

In binary 101010

Which code better conveys your purpose? The second. Using ranges in Python for the last five million yeasrs, it is a joy to see them in C#. The only thing to remember, as in most languages that use slices and ranges, in [start..end] is that "end" is a stop and is not included in the range.

Console.WriteLine("Hello World!"[1..5]);

Console.WriteLine("Hello World!"[..5]);

Both give us "Hello" rom [0] to [4] stopping at [5].

The latest version is Delphi 10.5 (I am still on 10.3). Check Embarcadero's website. Community (free) edition is downloadable.

I was very fond of Delphi but was very pleased when C# first appeared that it looked like Java but smelled like C#. I still go to Delphi if I want a simple Win32 GUI program.

In the development phase while(true) is fine and clear. When you are clear as to what conditions must be met to break out of the loop, we can set up a meaningful boolean eg while(NoReliablStatus) or whatever. Replacing while(true) with while(notdone) is a waste of time.

For some people there is nothing better than wasting the questioner's time!

What is it with this anti-ribbon thing? It is faster and more intuitive than the old menu system. I changed to it when it was still in beta many years ago because it was so well thought out. (Maybe 10% of use-cases needed help in the first days). Screen real estate is a problem if you are using an old small-scale crt monitor but thewn you can hide the ribbon and call it up by clicking on the tab of need. I found when all machines where i worked were using the ribbons, many users were nervous and confused but five or 10 minutes of effective training and they needed no more support. I can understand the initial unfamiliarity (especiaaly if people look for options by habit rather than logic) but, with appropriate will, most users never look back. Whenever I have to support an older Office with menus/buttons it feels really, really clunky.

If our list is the_list in Python we have new_list = sorted(the_list)[:n]

The answer is simple - take the time (it really isn't much time in practice). When you do, you will be startled how much easier to use styles have become. I have been using Word since its DOS days and the ribbon interface is the most polished. When I go back to an earlier version for any reason, the toolbar seems very clunky and inefficient. Just think, when the original toolbar first appeared in Word, I disliked it for a while because I, foolishly, so wanted to do things the old way!

The Internet is getting out of control. we are in trouble unless we program it! Oh my God - what if we can't turn it off!!???!!

Bad example. The ribbon suits the vast (and I mean vast) majority of users.

you WILL use goto in any non-trivial batch file as a quick-and-dirty solution to a simple syatem problem (or just maybe you have moved on to Powershell or Python or whatever so can prove me wrong). Back in the old days, before exceptions, you might very well use GOTO in recovering from certain kinds of error conditions. This was especially problematic on the venerable Apple II which did not properly unwind the stack in these situations. In one application I had to save relevant state and decide on which point to re-enter the program to sensibly resume - I managed this without the spaghetti falling off the fork (as it were).

I was sitting up with my family through the night in England, glued to the B&W TV. I was 24 and it all seemed very important - the realisation of all boy's dreams. It was almost as important as the arrival of Doctor Who six years earlier!

This looks like a new word. I suggest somone invented it to suggest "can be held in the hand". A word in an honourable computing tradition - portable, luggable, handible!!?!! The original Compaqs were luggable, where the Iphone is handible. If that was not the meaning of handible ... well, it is now!

As an alternative to the Infinite Impossibility Drive (which has a nasty tendency to create and then assassinate sperm whales), you might consider Harry Harrison's Bloater Drive (from "Bill the Galactic Hero") - this instantly bloats the ship to fill the whole universe and then instantly de-bloats it to a different point from its original position. (Do NOT forget your towel!).

You have forgotten the Physics Shop at the Other End of the Universe. There you can purchase bottled portions of infinity, along with useful frictionless surfaces and massless beams. Bottles of space, under the brand "Really really really BIG", are also available. Unfortunately, they are out of stock of bug-free code.

Transition is a noun - not a verb. However,IMHO, American English (and increasingly Australian and NZ English)has always permitted/encouraged the use of nouns as verbs at the user's behest. This sometimes enriches the language and somtimes detracts. I have often seen "transition" being used as a verb - "... the system transitioned from state 1 to ...". Ugly and unnecessary, iI think.