And Thunderbird.

Freedom? That is a worship word. -- Cloud William The only thing a free man can be forced to do is die.

A recursion. A vector. A function. A scrum. A requirement. A specification. A crash. A basement (as in "living in parents'").

Freedom? That is a worship word. -- Cloud William The only thing a free man can be forced to do is die.

But, alas, as long as businesses keep outsourcing because they think it will save money (and thus increase profits) these living mishaps will "earn" a living. FIFY.

Freedom? That is a worship word. -- Cloud William The only thing a free man can be forced to do is die.

14. Buckaroo Banzai

Freedom? That is a worship word. -- Cloud William The only thing a free man can be forced to do is die.

I work for a payroll provider, as a software developer. I would argue that, if not for federal and state laws and regulations, most if not all of the "information technology" industry would not exist. I mean, how hard is it to pay people when they provide a good or service? If you don't have to report to several other parties (the IRS, state and city tax authorities, EEOC, SEC, etc. ad ridiculum), paper record keeping is sufficient, even for very large companies, and it was so until well into the 1970's. Yes, computers are really cool. Yes, the Internet is a thing. Yes, computers are useful and necessary for space travel, modern product design, scientific research, etc. But would any of that happened at all if the damn government didn't require massive amounts of information about things that, in a proper society, shouldn't be any of their damned business?

Freedom? That is a worship word. -- Cloud William The only thing a free man can be forced to do is die.

Back in the Dark Ages, I worked with DEC's RT-11 operating system. It was written in PDP-11 assembler. I had the opportunity to look at the commented source code, and I remember the following line:

NOP    # We don't know why it's here, but it doesn't work without it.

In a proprietary OS. From the manufacturer of the CPU. Sometimes commentary will reveal far more than you ever wanted to know.

Freedom? That is a worship word. -- Cloud William The only thing a free man can be forced to do is die.

What you are really looking for is a reliable way of uniquely identifying people. Name is good, but not adequate (see above re: J. Smith). I worked for [a well known credit monitoring company] that needed to do this. Add to that the problem that, in some countries with multiple official languages (e.g., Canada), John Doe may be the same person as Jacques Doe. It turns out that you can uniquely identify a person with a very small amount of extra information. For example, with full name, birth date, and current geographic location, you get something like 85% -- the problem here being ethnically common names like John Smith and Juan Gomez. Add a birth_place_ and you approach 100%. Basically, for most databases you need two fields for "name": a "Full Name" string, and a "Sort By" string. Add some software (commercial libraries are available) that takes care of the "John/Juan/Ivan/Jacques" problems, birthdate/place and current geography (zip code/postal code/city) and you can be nearly certain that you have the right person, and you can assign/retrieve a more convenient UID. The rest of the problems (e.g., last name "NULL", punctuation, etc.) are solved with correct programming. If you have trouble with "NULL", you probably have bigger things to worry about (SQL injection hacks).

Freedom? That is a worship word. -- Cloud William The only thing a free man can be forced to do is die.

Here's the thing. JavaScript's way of handling divide-by-zero is not better or worse than any other. It simply is. If you have code that should do something specific when a divide-by-zero happens, then you damn well better code it that way. If you are depending on the the language for that specific behavior, then for Pete's sake emulate that behavior when you move to a language that doesn't have the behavior. JavaScript does not matter. C++ does not matter. Algol does not matter. Only the behavior you want matters. So, know the language, and code accordingly.

Sounds more like a day in the life of a software pirate.

The only thing a free man can be forced to do is die. Freedom? That is a worship word. -- Cloud William It is our worship word, too. -- Capt. James T. Kirk

I am currently working on a system where most of the software was written in C in the early 1980s. It is formatted so badly that stuff like

 if (condition)
DoThis();

else DoThat();
DoAnotherThing();

is not uncommon at all. Add to that, there is no consistent use of tabs vs. spaces, no consistent tab stops, no naming conventions. Honestly, use the braces or don't, just be consistent, dammit. Proper indentation is far more valuable than brace usage; don't use TAB for indentation, and do stuff the same way, every damn time.

"The only thing a free man can be forced to do is die." "The right to defend oneself and ones neighbors is the beginning of freedom." "Freedom? That is a worship word. . ." -- Cloud William "It is our worship word, too." -- James T. Kirk

I was 16, in high school, 1973. Programmable calculator called Compucorp 025, about the size of an IBM Selectric typewriter (anybody remember typewriters?) with 10-key numeric entry. The program was read from punch cards, the language was assembler. It was like a drug. I haven't been able to stop since.