that, and the fact that the people using it got a kicking from some other group. We don't speak much Latin anymore, we speak a bastardised Germanic-y language called English even if we have kept a few words for specialists.

And I'd say we only speak English nowadays, not because how the sun never once set on a salmon-pink part of the map, but because the Americans chose to speak it. If the USA had chosen German as their national language years ago, perl would probably be quite different!!

Now that happened, and we add the previous corpus of English-speaking people, I think its reached a critical mass to make it a de-facto standard (like how Windows and not anything really good is our most common OS, or javascript is the only browser-based language worth knowing :-)

Maybe one day we'll replace it with Marain, but we'll need either a Utopia or Dictator to arrange that for us!

But that's because people are fucked up - and the language evolves to fill our needs of being weird and wonderful.

I think what's proposed here is the same ilk as that of Swatch Time. Someone thought its better if we have a dull but efficient system that reflects how computers want to work and not how people do. They forget that we're not (yet) servants of the machines and we like the craziness, the nuances allow us to express our creativity.

Now, I'm off for a pint, you can go and enjoy your 0.568261 litres of fizzy beverage while you sit in the corner with your po-faced mates and discuss base 10 maths :-)

I didn't mean "not use stackoverflow" but "don't surf it as a hobby".

I happen to have quite a big rep on there, but my 2 work colleagues here who are older than I am both use SO without having a user account on there. (yes, they agree they should have one if only to show their appreciation in upvotes). And besides, it wasn't as heavily advertised as I never noticed it (though I do spend most of my time on Programmers rather than SO).

I think many older guys just aren't as likely to be filling in surveys on SO as opposed to using it.

dammit, I'm self-taught!! :-)

I'm not sure he is - I studied late 80s and there were very few women in my comp.sci classes at my university.,

Maybe its a regional thing, I was in the UK.

Mind you, in my first year I had to take maths and another subject - I chose religious studies as it was 2 hours a week and the tutor explained that there were no wrong answers... I was 1 out of 2 males in the entire class of about 40. Best. Course. Ever.

no, we learned that tabs are designed for indentation - that's their purpose. So you prefer to ignore the right tool and slap spaces in instead shows you simply want to brute-force a poor implementation instead of using the correct tool, tabs in this case.

If Python had mandated tabs instead of general whitespace, nobody would be complaining and code would be nice.

tabs are tabs.

You know how people say "use the right tool for the job", well tabs are designed for indentation. So use them, rather than bodge some artificial implementation using an arbitrary number of spaces.

or... over 40s don't aimlessly surf the ends of stackoverflow to find the survey, or can be bothered to fill it out such trivia. Probably too busy doing things!

I know I do use SO but this is the first time I realised they even had a survey!

Their bus stops are all out of date for where I live

its very easy to go in and update them. So you can't blame anyone else but yourself for failing to help yourself with a resource someone else provided to you for free.

Hehe, strangely enough the company I mentioned also had a sysadmin who thought he knew what he was doing too - one thing I failed to mention was that all the developers work areas was on a single linux server (as he didn't want anyone working on their own linux machines despite everyone having a laptop just to run putty and email). So I guess even if everyone had got a copy of the repositories...

Its true, git is complex like Linux is - it suits the needs to Torvalds, but I think its popularity exceeds its ability, and many people use it without using it properly - for example a previous company I worked for used git for their SCM and I asked where the backups were I was told they didn't need backups because it was distributed and everyone had a copy of the repo... of course, that relies on everyone having a copy of each repo, or at least 1 other person having an up-to-date copy of each repo which wasn't the case. This kind of thinking wouldn't happen if there was more of a concept of distributed-but-from-a-central-repo. It needs the concept of a golden root from where everything else is sourced (and I know you can have this, but its more convention due to the distributed nature)

Still, it ushered in a new style of version control that wasn't catered for before.

Now we're seeing easier, more accessible systems, such as fossil by that attempts to bridge the gap between DVCS freedoms and centralised repositories and includes other useful features such as bugtracker in the SCM and still geared towards branches that are more collaborative than gits 'private playground' branches. (ie git is designed for people to work on their own and hopefully merge changes back, many other SCMs are designed for branches that are for common code worked on by several people and thus requiring less merging). Git works well because of how the Linux project is structured - a very large hierarchy, but starts to fall down in a small team where people don't have that arms-length working environment, or where they work on multiple branches at the same time (eg at work, I have my big feature and I have bug fixes that come and go regularly - git doesn't help in that environment unless I have multiple repos checked out)

I'm not convinced its he best designed, nor is the chap in the first link I posted where he complains that in 9 years of using WPF it hasn't gone anywhere and is pretty complex and bloated to use.

Now a well designed UI is Qt - where they enhanced the existing model with their QML language, so you could create a new control in QML and drop it onto an existing form. All the power of QML whilst maintaining the existing investment in UIs. Qt got it right, shame Microsoft didn't have those devs working for them! (perhaps MS should buy Qt out and use it for new developments, probably too late now they've released Windows 10, but it would have been cool, wouldn't it!)

Imagine if Microsoft had done that instead of reinventing the GUI wheel - you'd create a control in WPF and could drop it onto a Winforms dialog. That would have been good.

As it is, WPF is just now very well designed, and not vey well implemented. As the other link showed, the chart controls only work for small datasets, if you want something that works well - you use the old winforms one! I'd hazard a guess that they are also hardware accelerated purely by being constructed by gdi calls too.

So what's the benefit in WPF? It mignt be easier to construct new controls than winforms but is more difficult to use as an application developer, it performa much worse, and requires a lot more investment in training. If the end result isn;t acceptable to users too.. then its no wonder people are sticking with Winforms.

Or HTML GUIs, which is what I meant by ASP.NET.

WPF is very over-rated. that has poor hardware rendering that doesn't work as well as old winforms

Maybe Microsoft isn't open sourcing WPF because they know how bad it is. Only the .NET fanbois are still going on about how wonderful it is, even though the majority of UIs I've seen on Windows are using ASP.NET or Winforms.

I've seen a couple of WPF GUIs, invariably they're horrible - like what you'd write back in the 80s. I once saw a GUI that had orange and blue colouring with red highlight bars - yup, highlight the selected orange text with a red bar, reducing the distinction between the colourblind and those with perfect vision.

Its pretty slow too, a colleague had to drop it for his audio GUI as it simply did not respond quickly enough whereas the old C++ GUI worked perfectly well.

But its the latest cool thing so all the cool kids want to use it. I guess it's keeping them from node.js this week, so maybe its a good thing, but I can see why the Windows team says to write GUIs in html5 rather than WPF - if you need a plain LoB GUI, HTML works, if you need performance then you'll be doing it in C++ with something more akin to a game engine. WPF fails on both counts, and is too complex to boot.

Neither are quite perfect though - C++ has plenty of ancient cruft that;s there for C compatibility, but then, C# has plenty of cruft from its old 1.1 days (all those nasty, nasty functions taking char[] parameters for example.

But they're still better than the newcomers simply because the new ones are just as imperfect but without the benefit of a wide user base or tooling. Maybe one day Rust will become mainstream and we'll all start using it, and good luck for that day.

But, there's no reason not to use C++ now for Linux development. Moving people to C# on Linux is just wrong, not because C# is rubbish, but because it's not mainstream on Linux. The reasons not to use Rust or C or Go are the same ones to use when applied to C# on Linux. On Windows its a different matter of course, but Linux - stick with C++ and enjoy the benefits of the same codebases everyone else uses.