Android is free, Blackberry is free to switch over to it. But they chose not to do so.

My complaint is they plan to take the rest of us with them.

My favorite part of the story, and fits so well with today's story:
An assemblyman handed him the bill, offering to introduce him to the genius who wrote it. He declined, saying that he already met as many crazy people as he cared to.

Well we know that there was different amounts of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere through out the history of the Earth. We also know that was a long period where the cellulose in plants could not be broken down by bacteria and ended up being sequestered for millions of years, until we dug it up recently.

No amount of waiting will cause carbon to be trapped in the ground, because bacteria and fungus act too quickly to release it. Looks like fossil fuel was a one time thing and decidedly not renewable.

If we think having Cambrian period atmosphere and weather patterns are acceptable, then we should continue doing what we're doing. It would impact the security of our nation, and be very detrimental to our economy. But anyone reading this would have died of old age by then, so who the fuck cares.

Some of the L4 kernels were an exercise in trying to get C++ to be usable in kernel land. The one I'm most familiar with is L4Ka::Pistachio, it does a fairly decent job. But there is a lot of C++ you just can't safely use. That's not to say you can design a kernel where more C++ functionality is possible, but I believe it is difficult to make it work. More difficult than writing a microkernel from scratch, which means to me that it's not worth doing if the primary goal was to write a kernel.

As a system software engineer, it's been a repeated hell to get C++ compilers and libraries to build and work correctly in a variety of embedded environments. Even big environments like Linux with a full user-space and proper virtual address space. I think part of me hates the tools and implementation of several C++ environments more than the language itself.

JavaScript originated in a GUI, because it was part of web browsers.

I learned C without a GUI, and had to use command-line.

But I think we can all agree that C is not a scripting language. I think your definition is neither rigorous nor correct.

JavaScript is compiled to native instructions. But that's actually not even relevant here, see below.

But the real quality of a scripting language is if the CST (concrete syntax tree) can be directly used, or if it must be translated to an AST (abstract syntax tree) to be interpreted or compiled.

It has more to do with the internal structure and limitations of parsing and grammars than it does with the life cycle of your tools. The old idea that it is about edit-compile-link-run versus edit-run was always a simplification and never a rigorous definition.

Apple II is before VIC-20, and before the PET.

I'm a TI 99/4a guy, but I didn't mention it initially because it wasn't the first.
There are several mini-ITX cases with built-in keyboards, enabling you to build up anything from an Atom to an i7.

You could use a rag with a little soap and water once in a while. A mouse isn't like a keyboard, it doesn't have hundreds of crevices for dirty to get trapped in it.

I get a lot of dirt on the bottom that needs to be cleaned before it starts making it not slide well. Probably because I eat lunch at my desk, it's probably soup that has splashed on my mouse pad. (or maybe dead skin? gross)

I call it Apple II. 1 MHz 8-bit CPU, 4kB RAM.

I'll give you some context on where I come from, I'm professionally 100% C. Kernels, RTOSes, etc.

I played with D a bit, it's not for me, and I'm not here to sell people on it. I appreciate the effort you put into your response, but my original lack of understand on what D really offers remains. Responses like "high-performance applications" tend to flow over my like water over a duck's ass. (I'm the ass)

JavaScript isn't just for scripting anymore. The run-time performance is acceptable for some rather serious scalable software. And there are better static analysis tools now, although Java and a few others still beats JS at unit testing and validation.

There seems like there are a dozen new languages every year, D has been around for a while. I wonder if it hasn't taken off because of people like me not really getting why I would switch over.

It wasn't an argument, it was a statement to illicit answers to an unsaid question. But let's pretend it was argument, since that is how you chose to interpret it.

There are technical merits that D has over C, I'm not likely to use D over C, but that's really orthogonal as my job requires I use C and it's not really up for debate. There are some niceties(?) that D has over C++, but I'm even less likely to use a language because it seems nicer. The features of D doesn't seem like anything that isn't solved (but perhaps in an ugly way) by C++11 and Boost.

D's biggest strength is also it's biggest weakness. It's not a huge leap for a developer that knows C++ (or C) to learn D. But if you're going to switch tools, why not go for broke and switch to a pure functional language that will completely alter the way you have to design your software, perhaps in the ML family?

What is the signal to noise ratio for these statistics?

I never understood what D offered that wasn't offered elsewhere. The nice thing (and terrible thing) about C++ is there are several compilers available for it.

ChromeOS, yes absolutely.

I need to run Libre Office or whatever. Opens many years (sometimes decades) old word files for me, but your mileage my vary.

I guess you can boot up an Windows box or VM, convert all your old files before your ability to convert them is completely gone. And stop using MS Word if the compatibility is not likely to continue.