Whenever I read one of these "desires to fix programming languages", I laugh. I have been programming since the 80's and I too went through that phase right after college. However, I never had to work with all these silly pseudo-languages that come and go. We used ASM and C. Then Byorn Stroustroup (?) comes along and says, "hey, I hate programming, I'll add a bunch of junk to keep myself from making mistakes." I would've suggested he find a new line of work instead. C++ is a mess. It's poorly conceived, coerced and unnatural. It does nothing that a professional programmer can't accomplish in plain old C. As is usually the case, it causes more problems than it fixes, or it fixes one set but creates another set. Considering that most of the world is embedded micro-controllers, those of us who program them don't have gigabytes of memory or gigahertz processors as we need to be more efficient. Over 20 years this has taught me to appreciate C and ASM more. I'm glad I never got my wishes to have a bullet-proof language. I suggest if you're having issue with a particular part of a language, create a preprocessor directive and use it! For example, if your problem is:

if (x = y)

this can be fixed by defining:

#define IS_EQUAL ==

then used everywhere as:

if (x IS_EQUAL y)

No need to suggest the world change, or hope someday this 'gets fixed' for you. The C preprocessor is probably the most overlooked part of C. You can easily invent an entirely new language using the preprocessor. In fact, Linus Torvalds, who is a pretty awful programmer, took to using the preprocessor in ways most professionals would recommend against. But he recognized that it could keep him from repeating certain mistakes he tended to make.

You're absolutely right. It isn't going to get any better. Gone are the days when Bell Labs, PARC and others would develop an idea and give it to the world -- already figured out and documented. C, Unix, the transistor, Ethernet, the GUI, touch-screens, mice and many other ideas were created by one developer and then documented and given to the world. The think-tanks are gone. They didn't make any money. Today's bottom-line won't tolerate loss. It's all about the money and to a lesser extent, power. You can't get other companies to adopt anything unless they have a hand in it. Technology is being run by gangsters who all "need a piece of the action". Constant change and up-in-the-air standards work best for big companies to maintain a strangle-hold on an industry which can be turned on its head by one person who has a brilliant idea. We can't have that... Engineers aren't artists anymore, they're mechanics. I first felt this when C++ hit the scene. They hijacked the name because nobody would consider a language that didn't start with C. But C++ is a high-level language which has little to do with C. Today many universities don't teach C any more, forget about assembler. Committees redefine it constantly. Donald Knuth said, "We shouldn't stop when we find a solution, we should continue until we find the simplest solution". Odd how C remains unchanged and very effective while C++ continues to need more committee-based "features" and changes. HTML is treated the same by the same people.

Too often today people are trying to dictate to others. Why not just do what you think is right and let others make that choice for themselves? It's simple to believe that our own choices are the best, but it's outrageous to think they're best for everyone. As the song says, "Everybody wants to rule the world".

I agree with you. I've read the license agreement and I think its sole purpose is to have you agree to let them track you on the internet. This is so they can make money from selling your data of course. It's in the license I read. Adobe sucks and always has. Delete the update EXEs and remove them from the registry.