I got a BB Z10 for free for being a Qt developer and attend a developer event. It was my first BlackBerry, and I am so sorry that I will have to let it go, since I am so not buying a BB device if it's just running Android (If I'll end up buying an Android device, I'll have plenty of choices). Yes, the BB OS 10 interface is a lot better for me than Android. I loved the Nokia N9, and this one was even a tiny step forward, and I'm too used to it after 5 years of happiness. I also used a Jolla for some time, and is the kind of UI where I feel at home.

The way you jump back and forth between applications on Android is really really bad for my taste. I have an Android tablet, and it annoys the hell of me that it shows lots of poor screenshots of applications that I have not opened (e.g. when I just restarted after an upgrade it shows tons of them no really running). Harmattan (Nokia N9), Sailfish OS (Jolla) or BlackBerry OS 10 give a much more useful indication of what the application is/was doing, or additional controls. Besides, you see several of them at a glance, not in a stack view that only shows a tiny slice of the second one and almost nothing of the next ones.

The top shade got one step back in the last major Android release. In an Android tablet, the user had access to different quick controls swiping on the left or the right of the screen: now I have to swipe twice to have quick access to the Bluetooth control, so moving my headset from the phone to the tablet (or vice versa) is a lot faster and convenient in BB OS 10 with respect to Android (they used to be tied in the previous version).

I'm used to not being the typical user (I'm a bit more power user, fine), but seriously, changing from one application to the other (browser to podcast to instant messaging for example) or having quick access to Bluetooth settings is something I would expect done right in 100% of the mobile OSs for this time and age.

I think this speaks clearly of how bad was the decision of creating HTML 5, and not making future web documents an XML application only. With XML, the rules clearly state that a document has to be well formed in order to be interpreted by the XML parser (then it can be invalid according to the XML application, say XHTML). But no, they kept the incredibly stupid tradition of making browsers try to recover according to unspecified ways. I wonder how many workarounds are in the parsers of todays web browsers that swallow utterly broken contents that IE6 displayed properly at that time. Workarounds and complicated code paths that will probably stick for a really long time, since old content will not be fixed ever. And complex code paths that will continue to produce security holes from time to time.

Ironically, many (if not all) the usability issues that you mention that C++ could change, are nearly impossible to fix due to the C legacy. But having C as legacy is also a big strength: you can use native OS APIs with ease.

Yes, I know quite a few other languages, but I want to get into a widespread compiled language that has good ties into FOSS. Both Objective-C and C++ fit that bill.

I know plenty of open source applications, from GUIs in Qt and gtkmm to console applications and interpreters of programming languages in C++. The backbone of any Linux distribution is C and C++.

I know 0 packages in my Linux installation that are written in Objective-C. There are some, for sure, but are they widespread? I doubt it.

Odd, I thought it was exactly the opposite. Linux doesn't interpret the names at all. Only '\0' and '/' (in C/C++ notation) are treated specially by Linux in what can be allowed as file name. The rest is just an array of bytes. Is Mac OS X or Windows the ones that try (and I said try, since I'm not sure they achieve it) to protect the user from security and confusion problems. Is not just case sensitivity, think of pre-composed characters, for example (distinguishing modified+character from character already modified). See the interesting conversation after a Git release, where several developers explain the problems on the normalization that Mac OS X does.

And the source being distrowatch, a website for people looking for a distribution. Maybe it confirms that users of Ubuntu don't want to change distro? Or for people who don't even know what a distro is? Or who don't speak English?

Signed: a Debian user who complained a lot about Ubuntu on several levels.

And the designers of Ruby also suggest that you don't create complex class hierarchies. And the designers of Java created interfaces to avoid complex class hierarchies. Maybe the problem are complex class hierarchies, or trying to solve everything with OOP when you should not?

Let me quote from the biggest myths:

Maybe the example was too subtle, but for sure there are some things from /etc/sysconfig that are gone from Red Hat, and are substituted by Debian-style configuration.

Odd that of all possible choices, systemd developers chose almost always a way that is exactly the same or very similar to what Debian does. For example, I don't see stuff like /etc/sysconfig, while I do see things like /etc/hostname etc.

Sorry, but I completely agree with the story explained. My previous employer gave me an email address managed by Google Apps. I subscribed and posted to about 3-4 different open source project mailing lists. Obviously that's enough to make your address well known to spammers.

The amount of email in the spam folder was surprisingly high, given that my very personal email address, which has appeared during a decade (not just two years) on online archives of about 20 times more lists, receives a little bit less. But that's not bad. What I found insulting is that they had plenty of false positives. That's the worse kind of error in email filtering: you check your inbox more often, and is not a big deal deleting one additional email a day. But I found email threads of those mailing lists broken when because parts of a thread (just parts of a freaking mailing list thread!) were marked as spam, and was autoexpired (yes, I don't need to check all mailing lists that often). It also marked as spam one reply to an email I sent. A shame.

And yes, I used the "this is not spam" feature, but I got bored. The best I could do was reviewing all the filters to completely skip the spam filtering, which is stupid anyway in many mailing lists that require a legitimate address to subscribe, which yields a very low spam rate (besides the "join me in my linkedin network" that some stupid sent to the whole address book).

You were implying that using a subset of C++ features is not practical because you could "write C++ that is not guaranteed to be maintainable by anybody short of a complete master", which is absurd, because only a complete master could write that kind of unmaintainable code. Well, according to your logic and your subjectivity, there are only a small amount of people capable of that feat. And the fact that there are lots of C++ programs and libraries out there that are maintainable proves it.

You can not even identify one without resorting to factual mistakes. I'm running every day lots of programs written in C++. A simple search on a linux distro reveal thousands of packages in C++. Is that maintained by those "single to double digits" amount of people in the world? Sure.

Well, he has given that answer several times. On his FAQ, he says:

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses". Yes. Again, I very much doubt that the sentiment is original. Of course, all "there are only two" quotes have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Any practical example to back it up? Probably there are some cases of that, but the contrary is IMHO more common. One of the most popular C++ library out there, Qt, doesn't make you learn exceptions, and templates are only used for containers, so you rarely see one of those scary compilation errors.

That means that in practice, you see large C++ codebases that are very easy to grasp. At my current workplace, all C++ developers barely understand C++ outside the C subset, and projects work fine from the customer perspective. Do they understand that each time they pass a value to a function they are copying it, and that it can be costly? No, but luckily they are doing that with QByteArray, which is implicitly shared. They don't have to understand the feature. Besides me they don't even know it exists, but it works, and saves the day.

Funny that you mention that, because systemd exposes lots of features through cgroups and a nice filesystem on /sys. And to use systemd's journal's files, the documentaion already explains that you just open the files, memory map them, and use inotify, a classic notification API on files...