If I were in charge of that, you'd have it like yesterday :)

On a more serious note, at this point I wouldn't put it into the "never gonna happen" bucket anymore, just based on all the things I've seen the company do in the past year that were in that bucket two years before. But either way, it will take a long time - bash (and any Unix shell, really) really expects a lot of Unixisms from the environment that it runs it. Basically, I don't think you can get a proper *sh without having a proper POSIX layer underneath. And all we have today is Cygwin, which is basically a giant hack.

On the other hand, command prompt is getting some long needed love in Win10, and hopefully beyond. And when they asked about what people want from that effort, the requests for things Unix ranked pretty high on the list. These guys have said that they'll pay close attention to feedback, so I hope they'll deliver on that promise.

I think it's still severe enough. If they want to bundle those apps as the default in Russia, they should be able to do so without losing the ability to bundle Google apps by default in other countries.

Tower ownership is not an issue in Russia, unlike US, because mobile operators are decoupled from phone manufacturers. All networks are GSM and inter-compatible, so the same phone works on them all, and people can switch freely. The operators also don't control the software that runs on the phones.

What Yandex seems to be claiming is that manufacturers are, in fact, strong-armed to decide whether they want to ship all their phones with Google Play, or none of them. They are specifically claiming that a manufacturer was prevented from entering into an agreement with them to pre-install Yandex software, because they want to ship phones in other countries with Play, and Google's terms for Play require that they ship it in all countries.

If you read the details of their complaint, it actually has some merit.

Whether they waited for a "convenient" time to voice it, is another matter.

Their main complaint here is not just the tie-in, but that it applies all across the regional markets. In other words, if some Android manufacturer makes a deal with Yandex to ship Yandex apps, or set Yandex as default search, on Android phones sold in Russia (which is quite reasonable, since many Russian users expect those anyway), they can no longer preinstall Google apps on their Android phones sold in US.

Did you mean to write, "Azure has run Linux"?

That isn't quite true either. Azure ran Linux since it had VM IaaS, but it didn't have that "since inception", it appeared a little bit later.

Either way, this news is something different. Previously, if you wanted to run Linux on Azure, you had to run it in a VM, and Microsoft only managed the VM host. Here, this is a hosted service that runs on Linux, where Microsoft is actually managing those Linux VMs for you.

It should be noted that there are things for which Linux is simply better suited for whatever reason, and in that case Microsoft does not shy away from that, either. In particular, have a look at Microsoft job postings for PyCon. These are all for backend development, where backend is Linux/Docker, for the simple reason that 1) there's no Windows equivalent to lightweight containers, and 2) IPython users generally expect a Unix-like environment with shell etc.

(Full disclosure: I am a Microsoft employee on the same team that posted these job openings.)

We have it in C#, actually. The language has async/await specifically to enable this model (and still write code that looks much more natural then explicit Node-style callbacks), and the newish frameworks, like ASP.NET MVC or Windows XAML, are async through and through.

The funny part is that event-driven (or should I rather say callback-oriented) programming doesn't have to be complicated. Look at how easy it is in C# with async/await, where you can just take your regular code and sprinkle await over it to explicitly mark the points of async transfer of control - and it all just magically works, even when control transfer occurs e.g. across loop boundaries, or in an exception handling block.

If you really want types in JavaScript, there are half a dozen popular solutions to that problem - and since they ultimately end up as JS anyway, you can use them on client and server both, just like vanilla JS. TypeScript is one obvious example.

I also very much doubt that you can write any arbitrarily complex app without a single line of JS. At some point, you'll run into a limitation of your component library, and you'll be forced to roll your own or extend an existing one - and they still have to produce JS to run on the client.

"True OOP" does not require abstract classes and interfaces as distinct entities. In fact, it doesn't even require classes in general. Prototype-based is still OOP, and structural typing can substitute for interfaces just fine.

Sure, but parsing only has to be implemented once, and then everyone can use it.

And, coincidentally, Python contains its own parser in the standard library.

Ah, I see what you mean now.

Yes, in a case like that - for templating languages and such - you really do want the explicit block terminator. And that's what people do to Python in similar circumstances - just add it. Have a look at Bottle's SimpleTemplate engine - you might actually be able to reuse that directly as it's very lightweight, and it's generic and bare-bones enough to not really be tied to HTML in any way.

The generator ought to take care of such things, if it's written well (i.e. it actually understands the language it generates). Indenting code properly isn't really any harder than putting the right number of braces in the output.