Must be C++ as it uses auto transmission. I miss my Alpha Romeo Spyder.

I always find these sort of failure stories interesting.

Hi Daniel, I don't have enough "context" here for me to hypothesize there is anglo-chauvinism in the OP's post. I agree with the OP that the quality of writing on many CP articles is often dreadful ... from an "absolute" standard, but, for me, useful technical content is more important than style. cheers, Bill «The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled» Plutarch

The "why" is understanding why the author did something a particular way or in a particular sequence. Example: A lookup table might be searched sequentially, hashed, keyed, b-tree'd, linked list, etc. It would make little sense to use a b-tree or hash algorithm on a table that never exceeds 10 items. Likewise, it might make sense to use a hash algorithm on a sparsely populated table. I once wrote a an algorithm that used the first alphabetic character as an index into a 26 element table of linked lists where each major link list entry had sub-linked lists (almost a b-tree with sub-entries). This table of approximately 15,000 entries was accessed 1,000's of times per second and was dynamically updated with entries to be inserted and deleted. The processing sequence had to be very clear and understandable.

Its grew out in the 90s and people still use it. Hopefully with WASM we see it fade away.

I agree about bad drivers. Driving skills are not taught in Driver's Ed. The question then becomes: How much driving experience do the engineers/developers have in all the possible situations? And do they know enough to be able accommodate such things as controlling a skid on black ice? How about hydro-planing on worn tires? If they don't have the driving experience, how can they develop software to handle it? Just thinking.....

The vast majority of the time when looking at code I don't need to know what everything is - so without var I am presented with a load of noise and redundancy. If I want to know what something is and it isn't immediately obvious then I can hover over it and it tells me and for the purpose of that session I don't need to do that again. I prefer to concentrate on the code rather than a load of type declaration noise. Admittedly it is a fine line - I don't use var everywhere - int i = 10 never becomes var i = 10, for example. And using var has become something I have adjusted to over time - at first I didn't like it, then I used it to remove redundancy var l = new List() rather than List l = new List(). Now I use it in most places other than the aforementioned value type decls.

You are absolutely correct. Both of us missed parts of the expression. That is why I would more likely use the first variant I gave rather than the second one. And probably would write neither in practice, but without a wider context can't say what I would actually write. It would probably involve some restructuring.

From my experience, people tend to weight experience indifferently. 40 years of experience is 40 years of experience, period. Whether someone learned anything new during those 40 years doesn't matter in the slightest.

That's why the DOCKER concept was so exciting to me, to be honest. UCSD Pascal had a runtime. Under DOS it was dog slow, but the idea was basically a VM... It ran on Linux and DOS the same, and anywhere else they ported that too, if memory serves me. Imagine a world where (X-windows tried this), you run your application, and the GUI attaches to it! Meaning you need only configure standard IO parameters. Now, this was the beginning of EVERY COBOL program (remember: Environment Division, etc). We have evolved really far, and we are getting places. The one upside of the web was a "Standard" GUI available to program to. Making things like Proton or Docker with a port to do things workable across platforms. And I see that is where we seem to be going. But like Scotty in Star Trek said "The fancier the plumbing, the bigger the problems" (or some such)

rjmoses wrote: Firefox's monthly updates If only. They update it a lot more often than that. rjmoses wrote: Adobe Acrobat, Java Haven't had either installed on any of my machines in at least a decade. rjmoses wrote: This is taking up to two hours a day to maintain a limited computing environment!   So, I can't even begin to imagine the hell that IT managers in big corporations might be going through! They let the machines update themselves. If you're actively "taking two hours a day" dealing with updates, you're doing something very, very wrong. I can't speak for third-parties, but if you want to get at least the Windows updates out of the way, but you still want to selectively control which updates get deployed or not, have a look at WSUS. For my own home LAN (8 physical PCs or so, plus many times that many virtual machines), it saves me a lot of bandwidth, and I only have to click Approve or Decline once on Patch Tuesday, or whenever there's an out-of-band update. I can live with that.

again I state Quote: Code does last for ages, the code that doesn't wasn't written correctly. Also look into generic programing Its what programmers should be doing, and when they do the code lasts forever. Oh look code really does last for a long time