Without providing anything as useful as electricity. I just got so disappointed with Logitech now. Not only they discontinue products I like (and can repair myself, since soldering is not all that hard), they never provided parts (you can get those consumables like switches easily).

I once bought a $250 noise cancelling headphones (before noise canceling became a thing with Airpods I think) to be able to concentrate on my job.

Sticking to software development, pointers are obviously not a problem, bad programmers are a problem (cretins disguised as geniuses often are a very big problem). Bad management (forcing people to cut corners) is also to blame. And sometimes there are royal mess-ups in initial design. Of course the golden rule of any organization is to blame anyone and anything for your mess, but not admit your own fault, and pointers are a bit like quantum superposition, everyone heard of it, few understand it, so it is a perfect scapegoat.

I am not so lucky with complex code, so I prefer not to gamble. But hey, no risk - no fun :laugh:

Yes, I do encounter that too and I go first with smallest possible example - mock expected parsing results and compare actual parsing results, then mock that into expected internal data structure and compare actual results The last step would be a real pain, but still, mock that and compare actual results until they match (or you find out you were bad at mocking that part :laugh: ). Did something like this with ZPL graphics label export. Testing code for text to image is often painful.

I can always plan my coding in minimal incremental steps that allow to use mock data to test results of each step. But I am unsure how possible that would be in your case, after all I never did hardware related stuff.

I have had similar problems with my ink printers, finally bought the cheapest laser black and white printer (cheapest by cost per page with aftermarket toner and drums). If I really need a color printout I can always go to a print shop and pay for one. And for about 15 years I have never really needed a color printout. Except for the first one that died by high voltage surge caused lightning strike on neighbor's house i had no problems with printers ever again.

Then allow tail to be null and handle appropriately

Ah the simple joys of childhood, having a dog and a sense of wonder at the simplest of things. How I miss them.

Any language in which you can write working software is a real programming language. Each and every has its limitations. Although JS is being used in way too many situations, for which it was not well designed. I always thought that it should have been deprecated around 2007 for something more well designed or at least limited to client side basic UI code.

Oh dear, seems I have never needed that much accuracy after all. And in some cases such deliberations would not be possible on target platform.

I really don't understand this one, I have solved this kind of problem multiple times in different languages on different platforms.

What do you have in mind, when you utter the words "intelligent people"?

What a comfortable setup, you didn't have to swap disks.

Google translate voice synthesizer sounds agreeable.

Stupidity is unrelated to intelligence.

Yes, I also did not name it, I consider that to be a part of me, and as my programming skills went up I started thinking of it as one of many "subconscious mind threads", you know, like one for driving, another one for say art appreciation or software development. So I have several such "mind threads" and use them as I need to. And as I learn new things, I develop more such "mind threads". Developing the one for driving was really hard now that I think of it.

Until incentives change to ones that prevent short-sighted decisions and rewards are given based on long-term success of the product, this will not change. And for that to happen, well, some serious shocks to the system will be required.

CB is specialized for C/C++ and Fortran, so it will be far simpler than VS, but again, it is not simple. BTW it was my first IDE, so I have some newbie dev experience with it, it was not hell, but it still required serious effort to configure.

Nah, it is not simple once you try to go outside defaults.