AJAX was new. Used to be the terminal and back-end would only exchange data when you hit the xmit key, and of course the web re-invented this pattern adding nothing new, but then it actually went a step beyond. Of course, it's mostly abused in horrible ways to punish the user for the crime of being a customer, but then, what tool isn't?

Other than that, yup, mostly re-inventing of the wheel by people young enough not to be there for the last trip round.

When at last you grok the Tao of Programming in fullness, you will no longer have this problem. Seriously, one good reason to have a senior engineer on the team is to help guide you in doing just what you need immediately without significant throw-away work, or not-used-today cruft.

A couple of years? Writing dead code and cruft on purpose? No, that's nuts in this day and age. Write code properly such that it's easily refactored, and don't do anything to block anticipated features, but if you can't see ways to do just the immediate work and still keep it cheap to add someday-maybe features later, what have you been doing these 30 years?

I used to program using butterflies, but of late that doesn't seem manly enough. Now I'm programming by arranging cocoons such that weeks hence when the butterflies fly away, the desired atmospheric disturbance will result in the code on my HDD. Took years to get to where I could intuit the changing weather well enough, but now I feel like a real programmer again - let's see em make an Emacs macro for that.

or a car that is stopped completely (doesn't see it at all)

Ouch. This is rare, but I've seen it.

I'd be afraid if I was on a 50-mile stretch without having to think about speed my mind would wander, and I wouldn't notice this stopped car.

I'm the guy who never uses cruise control unless it's flat and empty for as far as the eye can see, though, so maybe I'm atypical.

Oh, believe me, with Visual Studio they'll come - when you least expect them!

What, there are language specs that don't have an EBNF or similar for valid statements in the language? Seems odd.

Ooh, sounds magical. Let me know when you find a theorem prover that is (even "in theory") complete and consistent (and runs in finite time).

I get that you're saying "but I really don't like that speech a lot". Do you get that I utterly reject that as a reason for censorship? There no need for any protection of acceptable speech: "freedom of speech" means "freedom of unacceptable speech", or it means nothing.

Spoken like every dictator and totalitarian throughout history. Liberty is more important than security - or at least that's the point of America, much as we struggle with it. Too much of the world is still places where there's only "freedom of wise-man-approved" speech, if that's what you prefer.

No wonder you're getting modded down if you think that's a formal specification! C'mon:

1. Abstract.

Don't use PHP.

2. Conventions used in this document.

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC-2119

3. Normative Guidance for the Use of PHP

One MUST NOT use PHP.

You're not an actual engineer unless you're rolling your petard up to the castle gate! Don't give me any of this new-fangled train-driver crap. That makes job searches nigh impossible, as recruiters keep bugging be for train-driving jobs when they are totally irrelevant to any sort of genuine siege engine!

What bizarre notion of "formal standard" are you holding on to that would exclude the C standard? It has a formal standardization process complying with the requirements for ISO/IEC publication.

An informal standard is "what some guy wrote", like the K&R C book (which really was used as a standard by compiler writers before the formal standard, and worked well enough for a while).

"Run, it's the Police Police Police", said the Police Police.

Ahhhh, the unusable crap everyone hates that is down all the time. People admit to working on that kind of thing? In public? Is it all still written in COBOL?

I care. Language cries when you abuse it like that. It makes me sad. Think of the small words!

For speech to result in physical attacks - a strong causal connection - that's no longer hate speech, that's "incitement to riot". We've had no problem keeping "hate speech" legal but "incitement to riot" illegal in America for centuries now.

Speech should always be protected as speech. But telling your bodyguard to shoot someone is not illegal because of the words you use, but instead because of the immediate desired outcome of that speech. Running on a platform of killing all the Jews is political speech, and should be protected (and for goodness sake, please oh please let the candidate actually say that sort of thing on camera, not keep it as a secret agenda, so that democracy can happen properly there). Saying "hey, lets go attack that guy right there, right now!" has never been protected speech.

"On a computer" changes nothing.

Not really. MS is entirely "cloud first" under the new CEO, and Amazon's investors are really intent on AWS as the cool part of Amazon. Next decade the world could change, of course, but for now those clouds are the jewels of 2 profoundly successful companies. Google, OTOH, I don't trust one bit these days.

I see "the cloud" as the best possible backup - I can't envision a disaster that would take out both my place and that distant data center, without being the nuclear-war sort of event that would make data backups the least of my worries.