Replying to myself since we have no way to edit our previous posts - I would add that languages of the BASIC and XBase families (in particular VB and FoxPro) are/were more general purpose than either C/C++ or Java despite running in more restricted sets of hardware platforms.

Most modern Wirth-style languages posses syntax-level compiler directives to specify the calling convention. Heck, most modern languages either have such a capability, or an intermediary wrapper or stub generator to do that type of bridging. </itisasolvedproblem>

Uh, you are conflating "general purpose" with "platform availability". C runs in far more platforms than, say, Java, but, from professional experience as a C/C++ and Java programmer, I would not call C more of a general purpose language in the same way I would do so with Java.

Stop it. You are making too much sense.

Obviously yes. But also, and this is a very Japanese thing, to ensure people know how to build shit. From my short experience with Japanese culture, these people are not afraid to automate the crap out of things, but are afraid to lose what the government (and the nation) considers core competencies, from manufacturing to cultivation of rice. It is enshrined in their government's policies and in their ethos. I am not making this up.

It is breaking news for most of us in the US, managers and otherwise. The implications of that last statement of mine are not pretty for our culture </weareabunchofludditeswithourheadsupourasses>

I know!!(10+1) ;)

Correct, sort of. There is the concept of running away from intellectual property (say, you work on Coca-Cola, and you run away with patented/secret drink recipes and formulas, and go work with PepsiCo or make your own company. This is obviously stealing IP property. Non-compete agreements do nothing of the sort to prevent this, and there are already Federal and State laws to deal with such situations.

Similar laws and situations arise when, for example, a employee at, say, an insurance company, takes contact information on the company's clients, and leaves to make a competing company, using company-owned client information to poach those clients. That is unethical (and possibly unlawful). An ideal non-compete should be aimed at preventing that.

Sadly, non-compete agreements have a greater, nefarious scope: Non-compete agreements are of a complete different sort - you work at an insurance company and you leave to create your own. Then your former company comes to sue you out of work, forbidding you from establishing your own company in the same metropolitan area/county (or state!).

This is the type of non-compete agreements that should be illegal, or at the very least be time-limited (say, 6 months) instead of being open-ended. And these are not limited to tech companies mind you.

Names and locations omitted for obvious reasons:I know of a person who was a professional dancer in his country of origin, came to the US and continued training (and working) at a local dance school.

Being the young, inexperienced foreigner that he was, he signed a non-compete. When it was time to finish his training, he decided to open up his own school on a different area of the metropolitan area he and his former school/employer resided.

Long story short: school tried to sue the living crap out of him, that he could not open up a "competing" school in the whole multi-county metropolitan area. He was being pretty much forced into a situation of forced unemployment vs change careers vs get-out-of-dodge.

Ah, America, land of the free, home of the brave... and ridiculous lawsuits, where enough money can buy you the power to shake up young, starting entrepreneurs.

Fortunately, a lawyer was able to advise him well, and a judge pretty much ruled that the dance company was in effect trying to force the young man into unemployment. Although the young man signed the NC agreement, the judge ruled that the agreement was unreasonable and illegal.

Banning such types of NC agreements explicitly is a good thing; it will stop harassing entrepreneours and former employees; and it will free judges from having to deal with such ridiculous cases

This is a solution looking for a problem. Or more precisely, you are looking for an excuse to use a piece of technology or paradigm. Don't get me wrong, your systems requirements might indeed be best served using a NoSQL solution, but what exactly has your analysis shown regarding this?

Scaling is not just a technical feature (NoSQL, SQL, Jedi mind-meld tricks). Scaling is a function of your architecture. You can NoSQL the shit out of your solution, but if your software and system architecture is not scalable, then having NoSQL will mean chicken poop as solutions go.

If you want simple, put a simple RDBMs schema (a properly normalized that) in place, and have your code use a simple, technology-agnostic persistence layer that maps your domain-level artifacts to database artifacts. If you ever had to replace the back-end, then you can do so with minimal changes to the API that domain-level artifacts use to persist themselves with the persistence layer.

Design your domain solution around domain-specific artifacts. Persistence technology is typically a low-level design/implementation detail, an important one obviously (and a critical one for some classes of systems).

But for what you are describing, the choice shouldn't even be coming into the picture without first having an architectural notion of your solution.

In addition to Option Explicit. Friends indeed. But to the OP's behalf, Option Explicit is relatively new (2005 I think). There is still a lot of VB code out there that predates that feature.

But even then I think one should not need to rely on such things.

I used to be a QuickBasic and VB programmer back in Pre-(Internet)-Cambian times (and, oh, the horrror, PickBasic with numeric goto statements). We guarded ourselves (or I least I did) by using strict coding conventions and Hungarian notation on variable names and function names indicating the return values.

To a similar degree I did the same when I shifted from VB to FoxBase/FoxPro/VFP (what a nice product it was for its time). Anyways, it was obviously impossible to guarantee a type-mixing mistake would not occur, but software written this way tended to be very reliable and sufficiently type-safe.

Done this way, type mistakes were easy to spot by just looking at the code. At the end of the day, as Joel Spolsky once wrote, it is about making wrong code look wrong.

Hahaha, bingo.

The mob would think otherwise (and sometimes they have the financial data to back it up.) Or a criminal caught by a homeowner in the middle of his third break in a state with a three-strike law - killing homeowner -> increase changes of avoiding an automatic 20-year-to-life sentence.

Heck, from drug lords to mobsters, killing is well within the bound of rational self-interest. Not everyone that commits a murder is a mumbling idiot without forethought (and THAT is a very scary, horrifying concept.)

So, by your own admission, governments do change. Now, again, should I bring counter-examples that do not involve a revolution?

By that logic, I I were to engage in loan-sharking and racketeering, those are good because they benefit me (so long as I can get away with it, of course). In fact, if I had the power to change the law so that I can get away with it, then that would be good as well.

See, there is good, and there is right. Knowing or ignoring the difference indicates more the type of person you are than the economic system that is in place.

Should I bring a couple of counter-examples from, you know, history to counter that claim (the one I made in bold)?