That happens to me when fixing bugs in a particularly old piece of code (usually the stuff done by overseas consultants... friends don't let friends outsource programming)... once getting the thing fixed, I often fail to understand how it could have ever worked in the first place.

No, controllable fusion power with a net positive energy output has been "a couple of decades away" since the 50s. It's only in the last several years that we seem to be closing in on the possibility of attaining it. Philo Farnsworth, of the whole "inventing televison" fame, yeah, him, was an early researcher, and helped invent the "fusor" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor) which was used in early fusion research.

It's not like just one language designer got a stroke of insanity one day and decided upon this

Yes, that would be whoever defined the format for make...

Like I said above, I thought it was a pretty bad idea until I started using Python. Now I really dig it. On the other hand, I'm very strict about how I format code, so I write anything as if the whitespace matters.

I had the unfortunate experience to be required to use VB for a project a few years ago, and in general I found it wasn't such an awful language. On the other hand, the application I was writing was for Excel 2007, and that aspect of it made me feel like I was doing Windows programming back in the early 90s, except with all the flaky OLE stuff added in.

Unlike the rest of Office, which I think is hideous and unusable, I always liked Excel, but after developing for it using VB for Apps, if I were in charge, I'd fire anyone who tried to depend on Excel for anything. It is literally, and by far, the most fragile and buggy development environment I've ever used in 25+ years of software development.

When the codebase you are working on has been garbled by 12 years of random tab indent settings and other similar butchery from who-know-how-many programmers (and in some cases totally incompetent consultants) and other nonsense. The indentation in the code (not Python, but C++) is horribly mangled in many places and sometimes all but unreadable, but no one will allow it to be fixed. The other developers I've talked to insist either that it's not a problem, or that we should keep tabs, and if everyone who ever touches the code would simply do everything perfectly and never make a mistake, it wouldn't be a problem.

This is further complicated by a plethora of styles that includes such nonsense as right justifying code, and people who almost literally seem to think the only whitespace you are allowed to use is tabs. Yes, in other words, there are large swaths of code where there are tabs between many of the tokens rather than spaces. Apparently, tabs are not just for indenting for some people.

You would think this would be simple, but in practice, it's not. You would think coding standards and style guides would help, but not if they're ignored, or they were mandated after millions of lines of code was already written in every conceivable style and a few that would leave you gibbering like a Lovecraft character. Then there are the files that had tabs randomly converted to spaces, with indent levels ranging anywhere from 2 to 8, and often at a different indent level than the code with spaces only uses.

As someone who takes code formatting seriously, it drives me crazy, but no one else seems to have a problem with it. I've pleaded to allow the code to be formatted with uncrustify or something similar, but no one likes the idea because apparently I'm also the only person who does any kind of automation and for whom adding an additional step wouldn't affect my work routine. Note: the complaint is not that uncrustify, etc., might break the code, which is a real concern, but that it would be too much trouble to use. This is very incongruous with the fact that these are very good developers who know their stuff and write good code (as opposed to a lot of the people who apparently worked on it in the past.) I'm just surprised how set in their ways people get.

Regarding Python, I thought the whitespace thing was a lousy idea until I tried it. I love it now, but I'm someone who is very OCD about code formatting, so I would format my code in any language the same way that Python requires. It took a little getting used to, but I think it helps make Python code more streamlined to read than C++.

The 80s suffered too much from political correctness because of concerns of "TV violence", etc. The real renaissance happened in the early 90s when a lot of shows were created that no longer talked down to the audience like so much of the 80s fare did. Shows like "Ren and Stimpy" broke a lot of taboos and opened the way for a lot of really good stuff that wasn't just dumb kids' stuff. OK, maybe it was still dumb, but it was _good_ dumb.

"The Jetsons" only lasted one season in the 60s. They made more in the 80s, keeping the show more or less the same. The new episodes weren't as good as the original, but they were at least less dated.

The original Flintstones show ran in prime-time for 5 seasons, but has been in reruns for the 50 years since. However, they made a number of spin-offs for Saturday morning, most of which were not very good (perhaps none of them were very good, I don't recall). I think they were making new Flintstones shows even up into the 80s, although I'm sure Wiki can tell you the details.

So you didn't watch Rocky & Bullwinkle and Roger Ramjet, or you were too young to get the Cold War satire?

Those shows were brilliant, but they were the exception rather than the rule.

There's good "Christian" music out there. The difference is that it made by accomplished and talented musicians who choose to make music with a Christian theme, because that's the kind of music they want to make. I think most Christian music is made by people who chose the medium to create the message, as opposed to people who had mastered the medium and decided to use it for the message. Of course, this is no different from any other kind of music... Sturgeon's Law law applies here just like everywhere else.

Remember the old Spider Man or Star Trek cartoons?

Yeah, having watched the 1960s version of Spider-Man was quite a letdown. It wasn't that good, and started really getting weird when Bakshi got more involved. On the other hand, the music was great and the theme song remains, in my opinion, one of the best ever.

The Star Trek animated series on the other hand was a different beast. Yes, the production values were really cheap, but the stories were generally very good, and the writers included several people who wrote for the Original Series, and other prominent SF writers like Larry Niven. Plus, it did have the original cast doing the voice-acting, which was a definite plus.

Poorly drawn, badly scored, badly scripted, and almost uniformly missing the hilarious innuendo and subtleties that were present in your typical 'toon from the nineteen-fifites and -sixties.

Warner Brothers cartoons and the successful Hanna-Barbera cartoons you mentioned were not typical cartoons in that era. The typical cartoon in that era _was_ "poorly drawn, badly scored, badly scripted and totally missing in any innuendo and subtleties", often a lot worse than what you see today, in fact.

It only seems different because we only remember the 10% of cartoons from that era that were actually good... you know... like the ones you mentioned.

TV quality does ebb and wane, but it really wasn't such a stark difference as you portray. There was a lot of crap back then too.

Well, that's appropriate because Windows 8, with its limited palette and ugly "Flat" UI looks like Windows 2.

NT 3.51 was one of the most stable OSes I've ever used, if not the most stable. NT 4 was still pretty good, minus the even number service packs. Windows 2000 was excellent, minus Explorer, which for me usually crashed within an hour of a fresh install. I always liked XP once you turned on the Playskool theme. Nothing since XP has impressed me. Just more bloat, and more effort to get it to look and act like it used to.

Ten will have a start button. How will it be different from Vista or XP?

It will be uglier, for one thing. You can count on that.