Bill Hilf has left Microsoft two years ago.

No, it's not. In fact, they're still adding new features to the language (though largely in sync with C# now, and catching up in some cases).

I very much doubt many people care about the Linux desktop. As far as platforms go, the realities of the situation today is that it's below all other desktop platforms and all mobile platforms. Note that the Microsoft effort to port .NET to Linux (.NET Core) is concentrating solely on the server side stuff: web, REST etc. And Mono has done some UI stuff, but it was always much more of a crapshoot compared to their server components.

This is an IDE feature, not a language feature. VS can do it for C++ as well, by the way. But there's nothing stopping someone from implementing it for Java.

From an architectural perspective, the differences may look small - an OOP language is an OOP language. But for those "coding in the trenches", they can easily add up to hours of saved time due to the ability to apply DRY more consistently, for example.

Granted, Java has caught up on the most important piece, which is lambdas. But their generics still suck (which spills over into lambdas, because they use nominal function types), they don't have sequence comprehensions, and they don't have any syntactic sugar for continuation-style async programming.

It's not a patent licensing scheme, it's a disclaimer, which basically says that MS won't sue you for patents pertaining to the CLR if you implement the CLI spec.

The brand, yes. The language, not so much. VB3 -> VB4 was a huge breaking transition in just as many respects as VB6 -> VB.NET, and that was in 1995. VB4 -> VB5 was also breaking in quite a few things, largely because of Win16->Win32 move; and that was in 1997. VB6, the last version, was in 1998.

So at most it was around for 3 years if you count VB4.

Most importantly, large chunks of .NET are now open source, including pretty much all of the web/server stack. It won't go away even if Microsoft were to drop it.

And which of those that you've listed were open source, under a license that enables anyone to fork and continue developing them if they so wish?

LINQ is just sequence comprehensions combined with a very primitive form of AST-based "macros" (quoted because they're actually runtime). The latter is occasionally useful though not a proper substitute for true macros; the former is a hallmark of any sane language designed in the past 20 years.

As it happens, I do know some people directly involved in it, and it's not actually the main problems. The main problems are the lack of a qualified labor force. The collectivist mentality is still quite alive and well in the countryside, and so a farmer who does well has to deal with rampant theft and even vandalism of his property, often from the very same people he has hired.

The other problem is that a lot of agricultural techniques and machinery in use are not very modern. They're literally getting a yield several times less than a Western farmer would from the same area, and that's in the regions of the country that are most conductive to agriculture (chernozem).

And yes, market forces in an autarky would obviously stimulate local production... but it still doesn't appear out of thin air. It takes years and years of development and engineering effort, and the thing is, the rest of the world doesn't stand still while that's happening. Autarky inevitably translates to severe technological lag.

Internally, before the economy can catch up, there will inevitably be a significant slump, as well. Just how much of a slump depends on how much the existing economy depends on foreign trade, especially import - and for Russia this is quite significant. Whether the populace would actually be willing to tolerate that for long enough for economy to rebound is doubtful.

Unless, of course, such economic policies are also combined with sociopolitical totalitarianism, Soviet-style. That can last for longer - especially as it doesn't need to spend resources on "luxuries" such as civilian cell phones, and can instead just explain the populace that such things are wasteful and unnecessary.

I don't think you fully appreciate the difference between the USSR in 80s, and Russia today. USSR got to that point literally through decades of economic hardship, and even then it could offer a lifestyle at best close to American one from 20 years before that. Russia, on the other hand, had its economy pretty much ruined in the 90s, and only very slowly recovered since then - and said recovery involved making the country a part of the worldwide economy. A lot of the things that enabled relative autarky in the 80s simply don't exist, because when you have free trade with other countries, they don't make any economic sense whatsoever to maintain.

Heck, forget about consumer electronics; the country can't even manufacture its own CPU for military tech (they can design it, but it's still fabricated in China) - and this is something that has been an ongoing, priority project for the Russian military for several years now.

The other aspect of it is that it's not just the convenience / luxury things, but the very basics, like food. Russian agriculture is in the shitter compared even to Soviet times, and to remind, they had to buy grain from Canada even back then to feed themselves. With all trade shut down, I find it very doubtful that Russia could actually feed itself well.

One could argue that without a fully protected freedom of speech, there's no real political freedom, either - i.e. maybe there are elections, but what good are they if people who believe they're wronged can't publicly state their grievances and call for legitimate remedial action via voting?

That's the problem with any kind of censorship... the ultimate threat is that being against it becomes censored as well, and then you don't know if it's really a democratic decision or not.

There are all kinds of interesting (or "interesting", depending on your perspective) people here if you care to look. For example, I once had a rather enlightening discussion with a guy who was a self-professed fundie worldwide caliphate Islamist (several years before ISIS, even!), about when and in what circumstances it is appropriate to cut off people's heads according to the Sharia.

You have to try the Bay of Pigs first before the embargo, though. And a couple of failed assassination attempts on the head of state.

You should listen to more than one source. You might have then found out that Chechens and Dagestanis are among those fighting on the separatist side, too.

And yes, there are Chechens fighting on the Ukrainian side. Those are mostly Chechen nationalists from the 90s. They're Muslims (just as pro-separatist Chechens are), but they are not Islamists.

And then you have stuff like this, which is pure trolling (this particular picture is of separatists, but it happens on both sides).