Posts by Elledan

Snakes on a wane: Python 2 development is finally frozen in time, version 3 slithers on

It's hard to see this split between Python 2 and 3 as anything other than a boneheaded decision. What other language does such a thing, other than maybe Java with JVM-specific features so that people are still using JVM 5 and bleedin' 6 in 2020?

As a primarily C++ developer (with Ada inclinations), it hurts my head to think of the disaster it'd be if for example the C++11 standard or Ada 2012 standard had broken compatibility with existing code in some fashion. Entire codebases split into 'old' and 'new', managers suffering aneurysms from having to budget in unexpected 'porting' costs for codebases that are 1M LoC and date back to some Pascal code that ran on a System/370 mainframe back in the 1980s.

Might one take this as a sign that Python isn't quite the enterprise-ready language it's often made out to be? At least the kind of enterprises where 20-30 year lifespans of code with guaranteed maintenance and feature updates are hammered into service contracts that the Devil Himself would get nervous from.

Pissing off a horde of OSS coders probably doesn't have quite the same impact, I guess.

JavaScript survey: Devs love a bit of React, but Angular and Cordova declining. And you're not alone... a chunk of pros also feel JS is 'overly complex'

It's not about JavaScript

The thing about these 'frameworks' is that they aren't so much JavaScript frameworks as DSLs: domain-specific languages, which just happen to be implemented using this prototype language that supports only IEEE 754 32-bit floating point and ASCII strings due to legacy reasons (like being dreamed up in two days back in 1995).

Why nobody feels sad about these frameworks coming and going, and JQuery being the target of any front-end dev's jokes is that websites are pretty much disposable items. Give it two, three years tops before the next redesign and change to what's hot and new then.That's why backwards compatibility or even compatibility altogether doesn't really exist with anything JavaScript.

Want to use JS modules? Pick your poison between AMD, NodeJS or ES6 modules. Oh, and there's that requireJS thing that nobody uses any more. Unless they do. Found a nice JS library? Too bad it was written for NodeJS and doesn't work in a browser. Or vice-versa.

Having done both front-end and embedded JavaScript development (yes, it's a thing...), it's left me burned out to the point that I'll be very happy to never have to deal with it again in a professional setting. It's a very special world, but not one which I'm convinced is healthy for itself or those who venture deep into it. I'd rather deal with legacy C or FORTRAN code bases than ever touch a commercial JS project again.

Are you writing code for ambient computing? No? Don't even know? Ch-uh. Google's 'write once, run anywhere' Flutter is all over it

I still maintain my position that the JNI is a prime example of cruel & unusual punishment, as well as crimes against humanity.

It's always nice to use a sane language that happily ties into the world of C, like C++, Ada and I guess Visual Basic?

We've heard of spam filters but this is ridiculous: Pig-monkey chimeras developed in a Chinese laboratory

Lots of us are chimeras

Recent research has shown that virtually all of us are chimeras on some level. Whether it's because over time the DNA in our various stem cells diverge due to (local) mutations, because of the cells from a fetus growing inside our uterus making into our tissues, or in the case of a lucky few, because of a merging of two embryos into a single individual.

By definition, a chimera is only viable if the cells can cooperate sufficiently to sustain a functioning body. This implies a strong level of compatibility. For us human chimeras (I'm an XX/XY chimera, AKA 'true hermaphrodite'), it's still a bit of a lucky process, as most human chimera pregnancies never make it to term. There are simply so many points during the development process where things have to go just right or the self-destruct mechanism of the host body kicks in. And even after those hazards have been cleared, there are still internal hazards that may pop up. For me personally that most popped up in the form of one of the most confused and drawn-out puberties one could imagine.

Basically what I'm trying to get at is that a chimera isn't necessarily something unusual or scary. And that we're all a bit of a chimera, just some more than others :)

WebAssembly gets nod from W3C and, most likely, an embrace from cryptojackers online

Readability of JavaScript

So, just how many folks would prefer digging through a mini-fied 1MB JavaScript source file relative to the organised & annotated disassembled source code of a WASM binary?

Because having done JavaScript development for a living for a few years (it was a job...) I am not sure what this touted 'readability of JavaScript' is meant to be. After all JS source has been merged into a single file and minified to 'compress' it, it was sufficiently unreadable that even us JS devs would just try to replicate any issues on integration instead of trying to do any debugging on production.

After four years, Rust-based Redox OS is nearly self-hosting

Ada/SPARK is laughing at your 'safe programming language'.

Show me an OS written in Ada/SPARK and I'll take it seriously. Not this warmed-over, basically-modern-C++-language with worse syntax and a much weaker type system courtesy of inferred typing instead of strong typing.

I guess they expect that this will replace Linux any day now, right? I guess Linus et al better start rethinking their disdain of non-C languages lest they get left behind in the Rust-revolution.

Oracle and Google will fight in court over Java AGAIN and this time it's going to the Supremes

The dying days of Java will be spent in court?

With Google seemingly having made Kotlin into its Java replacement for Android, it seems like only a matter of time before the last mainstream use of Java comes to an end. In that view this 9-year old legal case seems to be rather ironic. By the time this case works its way through the Supreme Court, Java support on Android may already be a legacy feature.

By keeping Java a closed language and by relentlessly monetising it, Oracle seems hell-bent on making Java less popular than COBOL.

Watch tiny swimming magnetic robots suck up uranium in a droplet of radioactive wastewater

How would uranium be the dangerous part? In a nuclear disaster, it are strontium-90 and cesium-137 in addition to radioactive iodine which are the threat. Uranium is harmless unless swallowed.

A much better use for these little critters would be to recover uranium fuel from seawater, to economically recover it.

Hinkley Point nuclear power station will be late and £2bn over budget

Re: Maybe China should build them instead

You're right, I misread the dates for Taishan 2.

I think it kind of nails it home that this issue is about experience first and foremost. Chinese culture is about getting massive projects done, preferably within budget and on time. They have also been hoarding technical know-how, and educating engineers to allow China to become a high-tech culture. That's how they came to start building nuclear reactors constantly over the past decades, with Russian, French, American and native designs in use.

It's a far cry from US, French and UK culture, whose last major reactor building experience dates from the 1980s or earlier. For the French to dive straight into the advanced EPR design after not really building nuclear plants for so long has maybe severely overestimated their own capabilities.

Maybe China should build them instead

Meanwhile China has one EPR unit (Taishan 1) already online and connected to the grid, with another one (Taishan 2) being connected to the grid next year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_%28nuclear_reactor%29

Clearly it's not that EPRs are hard to build, or necessarily expensive. Is the West incapable of large-scale building projects at this point? I'd even include the utter failure that is the new Berlin airport, or what should have become an airport.

The skeptical view here is that maybe we should just give up at this point and let China build all new infrastructure.

As Windows 10 lands on 900m devices, Microsoft shows us the shape of clunk to come (again)

On my current laptop I was forced to use Windows 10 on account of its UEFI BIOS no longer providing a VGA driver for the Windows 7 installer. Still hackable, but with the increasing lack of compatibility in such matters I decided I should bite the bullet and use Windows 10 on that laptop. After some tweaking and hacking I managed to get Aero Glass re-enabled on it, with rounded corners and everything. It now basically looks like Windows 7 with a few ugly warts where the Win10 UI still peeks through.

The only thing I really like about Windows 10 is probably WSL, as it saves me from the kludge of running Linux VMs all the time. That's why on my desktop PC I still run Windows 7, with no real inclination to 'upgrade'. My desktop PC is 2015-era hardware, so it'll take a while before I'm in any way forced to run Windows 10 on it. Maybe when I do a full upgrade in another few years from now :)

Developer reconsiders npm command-line ad caper after outcry

Welcome to the 90s

Making an open source business model sustainable is nothing new. During the 90s it were companies like RedHat which figured out that combining open source, proprietary code and services was a good mix. Advertising is more the Google model that popped up years later.

Unfortunately, 'just slap some ads on it' is only a viable strategy if your business is called 'Google', and even there one has to question the long-term viability. Spending some thought on what it is that your customers actually want, and how one could generate revenue off it should be preferable, if only because - surprisingly - customers don't like looking at ads.

Perhaps that providing support, or making one's contribution donation ware would work better than ads? A lot there depends on the perceived value that is being provided. In the case of NPM it's been often noted that it's mostly a collection of tiny snippets of JavaScript, not unlike those one could copy freely from sites everywhere during the 90s.

Maybe the expectation of making money off JavaScript should be adjusted?

Rust in peace: Memory bugs in C and C++ code cause security issues so Microsoft is considering alternatives once again

Re: Don't be a tease

Speaking as someone who has actually done work on the Mozilla codebase (around version 3.6 or thereabouts...), I can say that the problem that Mozilla was having had absolutely nothing to do with C++, but everything with the lack of a proper build system (60,000-line script in the root), no clue about segmentation (build system tossed all header files in the entire source tree into a global namespace), zero documentation (aside from a few inline comments in the source now and then) and essentially a burning dumpster fire of which Mozilla pretended that it was a functioning codebase.

But sure, their problem was C++.

Re: Don't be a tease

Rust is totally recoloured C++. And by the fact that it uses inferred typing by default (strong typing requires a lot more typing than in C++ and rarely appears in example code) it uses weak typing.

If you want strong typing, use C++, or even better: Ada. That's a language which doesn't allow inferred typing. At all. Not even a typedef with the original type it was typedef'ed from. That gets you a nice compile error.

That the Rust creators don't even know Ada exists says a lot about the language.

Don't be a tease

So if Microsoft switches fully to Rust, or Kotlin, or Go or whatever is the flavour 'awesome language' of the month, then what does that say about Linux and all those other open source OSes out there? What about LibreOffice and such massive desktop applications? Should Unreal Engine be rewritten from C++ as well?

Colour me sceptical, but this whole story feels like knee-jerking to me. Anyone who has actually looked at and used Rust notices that it's basically just recoloured C++, with an even more obtuse syntax, almost fully inferred type system (you know, weak typing like in scripting languages) and instead of OOP the not very intuitive Traits system (which is being added to C++ by some enterprising C++ devs as we speak).

There was the joke going around that Mozilla invented Rust because they couldn't admit to their C++-foo being too weak and their codebase being unmaintainable due to every poor development practice in the book having been poured into it since the 1990s when it was Netscape. Programming isn't magical after all. It's still engineering and no matter what materials and tools you pick, you still have to put in the hard work.

Out of Steam? Wine draining away? Ubuntu's 64-bit-only x86 decision is causing migraines

Interesting

So as Windows not only has continuing 32-bit, 64-bit and now 32 & 64-bit Linux (WSL) support, Linux (face it, at this point Ubuntu is 'Linux' for most people) is losing features?

I'm still no huge fan of Windows 10, but I really appreciate how I can still run any old and new 32-bit Windows apps, even those using legacy APIs, and with WSL and the upcoming WSL2 integrate working with the Linux world into my day to day workflow without jumping through hoops.

I wonder whether it's just a lack of resources on Canonical's side, or an actual difference in philosophy? If Ubuntu drops this support, does that mean that Mint Linux and Debian are also affected?

Nintendo Labo: After a day spent fiddling with flaps, you may be ready to, er, Lego

That warm, fuzzy feeling

Right from the moment that Nintendo Labo got announced I had this feeling that it might just turn into something awesome. Sure, the functionality that it brings isn't world-shattering. As the fine article rightly points out, Lego (and others) have been there already.

The biggest innovation Labo brings is that it's _cheap_. This enables the children who get a Labo kit to start glancing at all this wonderful cardboard, rope and tape lying around the house and beginning to picture their own creations, reusing a Labo kit or taking inspiration from it.

Compare this to Lego Mindstorms and kin, which when all comes down to it, is rather dull. The contraptions you can build with it are fairly limited, you're not going to build a grub-stumping robotic exoskeleton with it any time soon. Buying additional Lego kits is expensive, and as I have noticed over the past years, Lego has become less about 'here's a pile of bricks, make something with it' and more of a 'here's a design, build it according to the instructions' kind of thing.

It's hard to beat the cost, flexibility and wide availability of cardboard here. Want to repair or extend something? Just grab that cardboard Amazon box before your dad throws it into the bin and scurry off with it like a prized possession before turning it into another marvelous invention.

The parents will no doubt also appreciate the lack of constant pestering for $200+ Lego kits by their offspring :)

MH370 search ends – probably – without finding missing 777

Re: Silver lining

If I had been on the MH370 recovery mission, I would have looked on the map beforehand, I promise :)

Silver lining

Despite the tragic loss of an entire airplane along with its passengers and crew, MH370 has reignited a number of discussions about how to deal with possible future crashes like these, where airplanes are lost in uninhabited, hard to reach areas, or - like in this case - in the middle of an ocean.

What will come out of this is hard to say, but it may be that airplanes will in the future be tracked live by satellites, or we will have better recovery methods. Having much improved maps of large parts of the Pacific Ocean courtesy of a few years of detailed scans cannot hurt either.

We saw previously with AF447 (lost over the Atlantic Ocean) how complicated recovery can be, even if the location of the airplane is roughly known. That search took two years (2009 - 2011), in a relatively well-defined search area, carried out by a number of search and recovery missions.

As AF447 was following (more or less) its schedule flight path, it was fairly easy to deduce the rough location of the crash. As MH370 shows, with massive uncertainty about the actual flight path we are left to make educated guesses based on washed-up wreckage and ocean currents.

We will have to see what is deemed realistic in terms of technological options and available budget in the (cut-throat) passenger airline industry to prevent another MH370 mystery. Beyond that we will have to see when MH370's remains will be found. Hopefully before its FDR and CVR black boxes have to be written off completely.

Half of all Windows 10 users thought: BSOD it, let's get the latest build

The dark side of rolling releases

One thing which I have always liked about Windows was that you'd get the big new version (WinXP, Win7) and any issues with it would be ironed out with service packs and patches. The result would be a better version of the original. The current version of Windows 7 which I am using on my systems is a better version of the Windows 7 which I originally started using in 2009.

I also don't have to worry about a next big upgrade breaking anything or changing anything fundamental about the way the OS works (UI or API level).

During the time that I used Windows 10 on a work laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad T470p), I found myself struggling with an OS that was somewhat like the Windows which I was used to, but also beset with issues (configuring IME input is either half-broken, or I have to RTFM) and the limited options for Windows Update meant that other than deferring updates I had to suffer through poorly timed automatic reboots.

A few rolling releases later, I had a Windows 10 that had gotten more features shovelled into it (admittedly WSL is slick), but which mostly still felt half-formed and incomplete. This also isn't going to get any better, as each year's update(s) has to be seen as a new OS release, according to Microsoft.

I'm not sure I could commit myself to more of this mayhem that comes with this, other than maybe opting for the Enterprise version (in so far as it's available...) and hopping from LTS to LTS version by the time its support lifespan runs out.

This basically makes it very easy to just stick with boring ol' Windows 7 until 2020 (and beyond?) instead and miss out on all the exciting fun that Windows 10 brings.

This makes me sad, because Windows has been my primary OS since 98 SE.

Big bimmer bummer: Bavaria's BMW buggies battered by bad bugs

Crossing fingers

It's always fun to see a pile of CVEs for a system you actually did work on for a number of years. Curious to see whether the component I worked on was involved in any way or not.

Doesn't seem like BMW learned from the plain-text authentication issue BMW's ConnectedDrive system had a number of years ago.

As for QNX, it's not a bad OS, just horribly proprietary, expensive (got quoted 10,000 Euro/seat) and with incredibly outdated tools and environment (GCC 4.4.2 with Dinkumware STL on 6.5.x). Developing for it reminded me of using a Linux distro from more than ten years ago.

Wondering whether their Embedded Linux (Yocto-based) infotainment systems are similarly affected.

Have you updated your Electron app? We hope so. There was a bad code-injection bug in it

Desktop application framework?

Calling Electron a 'Desktop Application Framework' is like calling Google Chrome an 'OS'. In the end Electron is merely a fancy wrapper for an HTML/JS website. Like any browser it needs regular security updates lest it becomes the security risk its potential attack surface promises.

With Electron 'apps' being just websites which rely on remote APIs, allowing one to run arbitrary JavaScript in those browser instances seems like an exquisitely poorly considered idea.

Latest F-35 flight tests finish – and US stops accepting new jets

Re: This plane has been

I wouldn't put too much blame on the programming language used. We don't have the details on the exact runtime and configuration used for the software, as there are ways to make C++ far less tolerant of human fsckups and provide some level of runtime recovery. Of course Ada was designed from the ground up to brutally destroy any semblance of a 'bad idea' :)

That said, usually the way the project is managed is the first part of the problem. Add to that poor and shifting requirements, unrealistic deadlines, high turn-over due to burn-out and a general sensation of 'rushing through things' leading to demotivated developers.

Of course Ada is the better idea for avionics and related, and I say that as primarily a C++ developer. Yet there are few technical solutions to incompetent management.

Just be glad they didn't join the Java hype, I guess, or switch to NodeJS half-way through :)

Reg man wraps head in 49-inch curved monitor

You get used to it.

Many years ago (~2000) I opted for a Matrox G550 card just to be able to run two CRT monitors side by side. Since that time I have gone from dual monitor setups to my current triple-monitor setup with a total desktop resolution of 7,680 times 1440 pixels.

Having a central monitor is really nice for one's main content/editor/document, with the two other monitors for having documentation, references, simulation outputs, IRC windows, etc. on them. It's also great to have a single VHDL simulation's traces span across all three monitors to get that crucial overview when doing debugging.

The fun thing with using three monitors, and trying to use all three DisplayPort outputs on one's GPU (GTX 980 Ti), is that one discovers that three DP outputs is more of a gimmick, as regularly one of the monitors will desync because the DP hardware cannot keep up. Switching one DP output to HDMI fixed that. Using a single monitor would be nice there, but I like having the separation between the displays.

When doing drawing (drawing tablets), it's nice to have the tablet's surface not mapped to one massively wide monitor, but just to the center one.

That said, I have been tempted to try to play some games spanned across my entire desktop surface. Just because I can :)

Here's how we made a no-fuss RSS vulture app using trendy Electron

Call me old, but...

One of my current laptops which I frequently use dates back to 2007 (AMD X2), and it's zippy enough for just about any task. The only things the poor thing struggles with (even after doubling the RAM to 4 GB and adding a 7,200 RPM HDD) is anything involving lots of JavaScript and of course Java.

Running something like TweetDeck in a browser tab is a great way to bring Linux to its knees. Running an Electron 'app' next to the browser is a ridiculous proposition.

As a primarily C/C++ dev, I would have written an app like this in something like WxWidgets or Qt, have it cross-platform as well, and use less than 20 MB of RAM.

Now get off my darn lawn.

Unlucky Linux boxes trampled by NPM code update, patch zapped

To be fair

To be fair to those who had to reformat their Linux systems courtesy of this bug, I remember well from my previous job how incredibly hectic the pace is with JS dev. It's at the low-paid end of the market, so there's no real time (or budget) to invest in careful testing and development.

Add to this the enormity of the dependencies NPM downloads, the incompatibilities between NPM versions (e.g. the modules) and the commonly seen attitude of 'it worked on their system, so it should work on mine'.

As a result, JS dev all too often results in a frantic mashing of keys, repeatedly removing the node_modules folder, changing NPM versions, repeating 'npm install' until hopefully things Simply Work Again (tm).

I cannot say that I would care to ever return to that world.

*Wakes up in Chrome's post-adblockalyptic landscape* Wow, hardly anything's changed!

Lunacy

There are moments when I browse the Intertubes without an adblocker. Last time was when I had received a new work laptop and I was trying to just be productive on it (not browse dodgy sites, promise!).

Took me about a week before I broke down and went the full NoScript, uBlock Origin route on that system as well. That dodgy sites have horrific ads (hello, ThePiratebay!) is a given, but for software & hardware dev-related sites to be also affected by the same ad-network-induced plague made this easy.

Add to the visual cancer and blood pressure issues the fact that ad-networks (via JS) are also the primary attack vector for malware and kin, and ad-networks should be paying me to vet the safety of their ads, since they are seemingly both too disinterested and too incompetent to do so themselves.

F-35 flight tests are being delayed by onboard software snafus

Re: C++?

Ada is used for things where any glitch would be absolutely, completely, totally, beyond any shade of doubt inexcusable. Things like an airliner with hundreds of passengers falling out of the sky, an ICBM veering off course and circling back on its country of origin, or a satellite worth millions vaporising due to the rocket launching getting confused.

A military jet going SNAFU or worse is deemed 'acceptable'. I would bet that the scope of the F-35 programme is also partially to blame, along with the allocated budget. Ada programmers (I pretend to be one occasionally as well), tend to be pretty rare, let alone ones who know the language inside out. Unless you're going to shell out the big bucks to get enough of them, you have to settle for the cheaper, more plentiful options. Which is going to be C or C++.

Before the Ada requirement got dropped (as noted), they'd simply have to get enough Ada programmers together, now they can get cheaper devs. And likely cheaper managers as well. Speaking as a senior C++ dev and dabbling Ada dev, I can honestly say that C++ is just fine if you stick to the (well-defined) requirements and follow a well-designed architecture during implementation time. Ada mostly catches the 'oops' issues which tend to slip through the cracks with C/C++ dev (and other languages...).

A long-winded way to say that it's not the language that's the problem, but primarily the management that has to turn a set of requirements into a functional design and implementation.

Re: I can understand....

C++ isn't always C++. It primarily refers to the specification, but the implementation can differ significantly. Look at managed C++ on .NET, for example, or the various runtimes which add runtime safety features which makes it more akin to Ada. Without more details it's hard to condemn them on this fact alone. Be grateful that they didn't pick Rust or JavaScript at least :)

That said, I agree that using Ada would make sense here, mostly due to the strict definition of the underlying hardware in the application, which theoretically makes it fool-proof (until a better idiot is encountered, of course).

Crypto-jackers slip Coinhive mining code into YouTube site ads

Static HTML is the best

For years now I have gotten used to browsing with ads and JavaScript disabled, only (temporarily) whitelisting a URL when I absolutely need to use a feature on that site. Lots of websites do however simply not work without JS enabled, often displaying just a blank page or something equally useless.

With Meltdown and Spectre we saw JavaScript-based PoCs which can (potentially) steal private data, including passwords and the like. JS is also a common infection vector for malware, which most recently saw this crypto-coin mining thing become popular.

The last time that I felt that I could browse safely around without having to install a lot of filters to remove all the (dangerous) crud from today's WWW was probably somewhere in the late 90s.

Did the advertising thing just go totally overboard? Is it time to treat JavaScript-based sites with the same disdain as we did with Flash?

Wondering where your JavaScript libs went? Spam-detection snafu exiled npm packages

The better way

One thing which amazes me so much about the JavaScript and Java ecosystems ('swamps'?) is that their idea of 'dependency management' involves pulling libraries and snippets from all across the internet. Whether it's NPM or Maven (Nexus), the issue remains the same. Good luck compiling that 1-year old project because some crucial dependencies no longer match or have gone AWOL.

Or hey, maybe you fancy compiling/building a project somewhere where pulling down half a GB of dependencies won't go over so well?

In the very comfortable world of C/C++ development, libraries usually take the form of a few MB (or kB) of source and a DLL/SO file if it's particularly big. You get them from one's package manager (Aptitude, Pacman, etc.) which is a repository curated by the same people responsible for your OS (or close enough, like with MSYS2).

Of course, the Java ecosystem seems to be currently moving to a dependency-less environment, minus one: the entire Spring universe. As soon as Java on Android is dead, they can probably just drop the 'Java' name and go with just 'Spring' :)

Oracle VP: 'We want the next decade to be Java first, Java always'

Design-by-committee languages suck

No unsigned integers (now awkwardly crammed back in), only Big Endian support, everything is a reference and a potential Null type (argh!), the horrors of the JNI, no multiple inheritance, no pass-by-reference, no default parameters, no defining of custom operators... etc.

Speaking as a primarily C++ dev who also does work in other languages (including Java, both web platform and Android), I can honestly not wait for the day that Java just goes away. It's such a horribly designed, flawed and broken-by-design language that simply should not exist, let alone be praised in any way or fashion. Somewhat like JavaScript, but I digress.

Here's hoping that Google will indeed be dropping Java soon as a first citizen on Android and we can observe the slow demise of a language-that-never-should-have-been :)

Java? Nah, I do JavaScript, man. Wise up, hipster, to the money

Re: Crippled C++

"Java IS simple."

The hours I have wasted debugging issues with the JVM's GC (Android and server), as well as untangling multi-layered levels of exceptions, fixing NullPointerExceptions (Null types are a design flaw), and discovering code flow in a Java application using interfaces and injection have made it clear to me that Java is not 'simple'.

If anything, Java lends itself for the writing of applications which are even less maintainable than if they were written in any other language. I have had more fun debugging C++ code which made heavy use of templates.

Crippled C++

After a number of years of programming Java, I have come to realise that Java is merely a regression in programming languages. It's essentially C++-with-only-classes-and-fewer-types. Oh, and you only get pointers (the basic type, no smart pointers) with no fancy pointer arithmetic to ease the pain.

I can get why COBOL is still doing well today. It's a well-designed language which went through literally decades of improvements to add to its versatility. Much like with JavaScript I have no clue why Java is even popular, however, beyond it being pushed in an unrelenting fashion (oh hi, Oracle!) and having become part of the CEO Buzzword Bingo.

But hey, C++ is just way too bloody complex (said whilst snickering).