Thanks for the helpful response. The BC looks like a potentially very useful anti-bugging tool.

Well, I suppose the DoD association probably turned off a lot of people… but the language lived up to its promise of being a strict schoolmarm so if that is what people are looking for these days it is still an option. It can link with C, not sure about C++.I am not sure what being in the Linux or Windows kernels says other than reinforcement of the popularity contest… Windows is proprietary, and Rust being in Linux is hardly controversy-free.

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts. I also found this:

https://blog.adacore.com/should-i-choose-ada-spark-or-rust-over-c-c#%3A~%3Atext=Rust+pushes+memory+safety+very%2CThese+are+just+two+examples.

I have only skimmed the surface of learning Rust, but I am wondering what it has over Ada. The memory safety features that Rust emphasizes have been standard there for 40 years, and just as unglamorous compared to C++.

I tend to focus on scripting nowadays… R and Pyrhon… with the odd C++ for high-speed algorithms because it is popular. But is Rust merely a new face on Ada?

Read other people’s code… particularly code by experienced developers. One good way to do that is to single-step debugging through the test code in a well-known package, stepping into the code being tested.

I suppose if you don’t know how test frameworks like pytest work, tackling how they work and how to do single-stepping with some toy example code will be a prerequisite for the above, as will spending some time studying how packages are made. (The latter may seem unattractively tedious, but the knowledge will pay off even if you never become an expert at making your own packages.)

These exercises are very likely to expose weaknesses in your understanding of all sorts of things. Be patient and keep studying!

When you come across some Python code for something written 5 years ago and they used four contributed packages that the programmers have changed the API on three times since then, you want to set up a virtual environment that contains those specific versions so you can at least see how it worked at that time. A small part of this headache comes from Python itself mutating, but the bulk of the problem is the imported user-contributed packages that multiply the functionality of Python.

To be sure, it would be nice if those programmers were all dedicated to updating their code, but with hundreds of thousands of packages that could be imported written by volunteers, you can’t afford to expect all of them them to stop innovating or even to continue maintaining past projects for your benefit.

If you have the itch to fix something old so it works in the latest versions of everything, you have that option… but it is really hard to do that if you cannot see it working as it was designed to work when it was built.

I didn’t say it was unobtainable. But it might look/behave quite different than the tools you are currently using.

As for Microsoft Exchange, I only use that for work, and my employer would not allow me to connect from my personal machine anyway. I am not saying that you that you have to give up your favorite tools… but I am saying that it you are putting up so many fences then you might as well stay with what you have.

No.

If you ever so carefully paint yourself into a corner then the corner is where you will be stuck. How badly do you want out of your corner?

There are FOSS and SAAS options that could work if you wanted them to… but whether they will depends on you.

Meat eaters trying to become vegetarian for ethical reasons often fail because the “un-meat” options out there don’t meet their standards. Success almost always requires some letting go and re-adjusting. If you are not open to that then don’t force yourself to put up with something you don’t really want.

bit of a cutthroat way to characterize what you “like”. Might actually make the interviewer downvote you for threatening their position.

Having used the web version of Office at my job, I know I would not pay for it. It is compatible-ish, but severely lacking in features, enough so that I don’t trust it to render properly or maintain the formatting entered using the desktop app. If that is good enough then there are lots of alternatives.

Way too late for that. Every language I know makes some kind of auto conversion for numeric comparisons… and sometimes for strings as well.

Using sudo when it isn’t necessary, and the real cannon: sudo su… Adding sudo to your command lines indiscriminately causes files you create to be owned by root even though they are in your home directory, and then you end up using sudo to make changes to the files… and then the filesystem permissions cannot prevent you from successfully running an accidental “sudo rm -rf /” command.

Seriously… sudo is not a “habit” to develop in order to avoid dealing with filesystem permissions problems.

Noob question?

You do seem confused though… Debian is both a distribution and a packaging system… the Debian Stable distribution takes a very conservative approach to updating packages, while Debian Sid (unstable) is more up-to-date while being more likely to break. While individual packages may be more stable when fully-updated, other packages that depend on them generally lag and “break” as they need updating to be able to adapt to underlying changes.

But the whole reason debian-based distros exist is because some people think they can strike a better balance between newness and stability. But it turns out that there is no optimal balance that satifies everyone.

Mint is a fine distro… but if you don’t like it, that is fine for you too. The only objection I have to your objection is that you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater… the debian packaging system is very robust and is not intrinsically unlikely to be updated.

Functions don’t return… equals goto. Everything must be done by side effects… all variables are global. Global state mutation is inheritance… no grok. Every call is non-blocking and spawns a new thread… atomic bomb for junior software engineers.

??? … shorting the stock of the company that adopts this.

Profit!

Jesus. The initial transient used to be about 3%, but now is under 1% for most product being sold. It was never near 20%.

But that doesn’t stop idiots from saying “we have optimizers” and installing them in the shade or facing north and acting surprised when they underperform.