Can it be that the customer's IT department was so busy with doing stuff they can to stop & think about whether they should? I swear, most policies in my company stem from someone eager to make themselves noticed. Meaning making wind.

Exactly one, as in 10^x. Or none with Ex.

Big companies are free to ignore any standard bodies. I think, the proper solution grows with the grassroots: don't adopt that stuff that you just described. If you're working on a company where some ego is good at wowing managers into letting said ego decide on things no matter how incompetent, change companies. Developers tend to not have too much trouble getting jobs. If you're working elsewhere and consider adopting such a for-some-ego's-sake monstrosity, don't.

Get down with reverse engineering. It's like solving a satisfying puzzle when you manage to get something to work!

What did you expect for 50 bucks? Documentation takes time, often more time, than the actual development and time is money.

I grew up in a home (family, not foster), but I surely do have a heap lot of emotional baggage (including having spent a couple weeks of my life in a psychosomatic clinic and a couple years more with regular counseling to get to gripes with life). I managed to finish school & university, but I've studied physics, not informatics. I work as a programmer now and one of the dudes at the company once told me that they didn't really want to hire me (for not having the right field they're looking for), but they were really desperate. On the other hand, some educated-in-informatics co-workers of mine are way worse learners, than I am. That kind of guy who say "I've learned to do it like that half a century ago", utterly ignoring all the progress made in said half century. I love programming for, among other reasons, similar to yours: you can do that stuff self-taught. I never needed a single cent to get into it, IDEs are free, learning resources are free, all that's left is the own will to learn and to think.

I KINDA get that performance standpoint. MS surely took their time with Vista, so the period in time between XP and Vista was way longer, than between XP and 2000 or between Vista and 7. Meaning with XP, that "I'll never need to upgrade"-stance was way more likely to stuck than with any other Windows version. Same goes for the start menu, the "me n0 likey change"-crowd got quite a lot of time to get accustomed to XP, way more time than to any other Windows version. I agree with you, starting programs is way easier. That didn't really change since Vista though. In looks yes, in functionality barely if at all. As for 10's performance, it runs absolutely fine on contemporary work/hobby-grade hardware. Even on my bathtub-reading-grade low-end Atom tablet (although I think some minimalistic Linux would yield better performance)! Where 10 REALLY sucks though, is HDDs. Never ever again will I try to run Windows 10 off an HDD. This OS is soooo not working on a system HDD, it's incredible. If someone doesn't know the difference between an HDD and an SSD, I totally get how they would get the impression Windows 10 runs like an old lady through molasses, despite the CPU & RAM having Big Numbers on the discounter product box (because Big Numbers on the box is often all that matters, which leads to amoral companies stuffing huge HDDs into their boxes, instead of smaller but better SSDs). I bet, that would barely matter if at all unter Windows XP.

Hands down the 3 hardest problems in programming: -naming stuff -off-by-1-errors For throwaways, I usually pick my repertoire of Result (for holding something that'll get returned) and Scrap (generic temporary). For stuff like responses from dialog boxes, I either take my old-and-tried Scrap, or give it some meaningful name like "SerialNo" when the user is prompted for a serial.

I don't remember NOT wiping & cleanly reisntalling any new pre-build PC I bought, except a cheap tablet from Odys which, oddly enough, came with only very little unobtrusive preloaded stuff.

I've recently written something similar, except (ok, that's a bad pun) this all is wrapped in a try-catch-log within the main application logic loop, meaning my middle layers often catch low-level exceptions and forward them. I.e. when my HAL throws a "Don't receive any data"-exception, my middle layer catches it and throws it as "Target device sends no data" for the high-level main loop to catch. That of course is a different situation. You clearly said that's it and nothing additional. Come to think of it, that's another example for "patterns aren't bad, but they can be put to bad use".

[C++ Standards Support in GCC- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)](https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html#cxx20)

Indeed. C++20-support in MSVC++ is labeled experimental. As it is for Clang and GCC. Ok, Clang calls it's status "partial", but that doesn't read any better than "experimental".

You can run MSVC++ in C++17 mode, unlike IE which only got standards mode in betas, but not in releases.

Speaking of ugly code due to ugly algo, VIF tables in the M-Bus norm are a bloody nightmare.

Requirements. Those I surely wish were fixed. Yeah, I can anticipate a couple things, but I also end up with monstrosities after months of iteration.

IMHO none. Modulating one's brain activity with substances instead of sheer will sounds compelling at first, but there's the danger of addiction (which caffeine exhibits). Caffeine has shown to increase the number of melatonine receptors (meaning increasing the overall tirendness unless countered with more caffeine), caffeine has shown to lower the amount of grey matter (this effect proven to be reversible though) and consuming something brain-changing and addiction-fueling regularly is IMHO not worth it. I'm not a huge fan of hops tea for falling-asleep-purposes either. Yes, it works, it's got way less side-effects than commercially available pills, but it's still something the brain can get used to (so failing to deal with lack of) when taken regularly. Now when it comes to recreational substance use (as opposed to goal-oriented substance use), I do love myself a beer or two (or a couple more) every now and then. On the other hand, in Bavaria, Germany, beer is basically a basic food. Not to say I've not seen alcohol addiction second-hand...

Ah, I understand. Thank you for the explanation! Full disclosure: I don't write generators. I prefer shouldering the burden to drive something data-driven from the get-go then to go through the intermediate step of writing a generator (that generates something that gets the actual job done). I find the one-step-approach way easier to debug, adopt to future changing requirements (which will of course change because that's what requirements simply do) and to teach to someone freshly joining the team. Should I ever be explicitly required to write a generator (instead of getting things done one way or another), I'll heed your words.

That depends on what project & what platform. The stuff I work on in Delphi or C++ builds fast. With precompiled headers for C++ anyway. Without them, I might just as well go back to my company's DOS-based product which I also maintain. I got this witty comic printed & glued to the side of the monitor attached to that DOS-based system https://xkcd.com/303

Is LINQ bad'ish or orders of magnitude slower, than those hand-written operations? I ask because I wonder about performance implications myself, while also regarding code read-/maintainability (after all, if performance was all I cared about, I'd hand-optimize everything in assembly anyway, engineering is all about trade-offs).

Why decimals instead of doubles though? Not trying to question the decision, I'd like to understand for myself.