It is at fault. It's the job of the wrapper to present a consistent interface to the things being wrapped. Otherwise, why even bother?

And yet the only PHP command line utilities I've ever seen are shells for controlling PHP web apps. I've never seen a PHP GUI app so I can't speak to that.

For being as allegedly suitable for developing those kinds of things, almost no one seems to be doing it.

Yes, it is. There are plenty of languages that can cleanly generate web pages and system and application development. Web frontends are important and popular, but hardly the end-all be-all of modern programming. PHP is losing a lot of ground to single-page frameworks like AngularJS. It never had ground for backend platform development outside a handful of visible companies: for every Facebook, there are 100 companies with Java or Python infrastructure platforms.

I contend that PHP is good at exactly one thing: gathering data from backing stores and formatting it as HTML. That's being quickly superseded by browser JavaScript or portable device apps that fetch the same data through REST and format it themselves.

PHP is Turing complete, so it's technically possible to write anything in PHP that you could write in another language. That seems to be about the most it's got going for it. PHP does nothing to help programmers write sane, maintainable code. It's almost impossible to develop without having a browser tab open to php.net ("The online docs are great!" "Well, they'd have to be."). There is zero consistency with things like argument order. Dangerous legacy concepts like "mysql_real_escape_string" are only recently deprecated and don't have a set removal schedule. It's a one-trick pony that's nearly useless outside its niche as a web page generation language. It's just a mess - a dangerous, unmaintainable mess.

I won't refuse to use an app just because it's written in PHP, but I do heavily weight it when comparing alternatives. PHP is a powerhouse in much the same way as McDonald's. It may be ubiquitous, but it still sucks and you have to question the judgement of anyone who chooses it to start a new project.

Well, that and the fact that many of us build ludicrously over-specced machines whenever we actually upgrade. "Well, I'll be watching a lot of Youtube videos, so 32GB of RAM, 16 cores, 16TB of spinning storage, and 2TB of SSD should just about cover it. Oh, and toss in a couple of GPUs because I've deluded myself into thinking I'll write a protein folding simulator some weekend."

Sometimes it takes a while for your technology to become obsolete when you've installed ASCI Red in your garage.

Surely not.

I'm not sure about that. My couch isn't all that far away from our 60" 1080p screen and don't notice individual pixels even in things like the on-screen channel guide. There's an enormous quality leap from 480 to 1080, but not as much of a visible difference after that. You'd hear a big difference between 22KHz audio and CD-quality 44.1KHz recordings, but few people except trained experts using special equipment could hear the difference between 44.1KHz and 96KHz. Well, same with video: the current standards are pretty close to the limits of most peoples' perception, and comes at a significant component price, storage, and bandwidth cost.

That's because your MBP has a hard disk drive that adds a lot of harsh harmonics to the signal. People who actually care about their video viewing use SSDs, which have straighter 1's and rounder, more organic 0's that improve depth of field and staging.

Tell your ineffective boss to GFY and upgrade to a real job. I'm not even joking a little. A shop that won't give you the tools to effectively do your job is a special kind of hell that no one deserves. Get out of there before your skills fall so far out of date that you're stuck for life.

Agreed, and I'd never do that. I asked it OP was sure that they weren't hardware problems on his own computer and not something more widespread. I did that because I haven't seen any of those problems myself and hadn't heard of them before now.

Also agreed. I've filed plenty of bugs to Apple's tracker over the years so that they know someone's affected by them.

Of course not. Apple makes Xcode available for free and you can use it to your heart's content. The paid license is for distributing apps through Apple's store. That's almost a requirement for iOS development (although you can install home-written software on your own stuff, I think), but not at all needed for Mac development. Lots of software is available via the Mac app store; lots more is available through developers' own websites.

They wouldn't be. Fortunately, they don't have to be.

What's the free equivalent?

I've experienced literally none of those things on any of the Macs or iOS devices that I come in contact with daily. Are you certain that those aren't particular to your own system?

Not implying that those are bug-free OSes, I say typing on "ComputerName (23)".

In what way?

Why. It's not criminally PC to use either singular pronoun when referring to a hypothetical person. I think the fact that you felt it necessary to comment on it says more about you than the author.

In my hometown, Red Cross kept raising the rates they charged to local hospitals for donated blood. Eventually it became so expensive that a local coalition founded their own blood bank and began distributing blood products for much lower prices.

I don't begrudge the Red Cross selling donated blood. Supplies, equipment, refrigeration, etc. all cost a lot of money and even a 100% volunteer organization can't wave that stuff away. I begrudge them charging so much that another, much smaller group without the same national recognition or economies of scale can set up a parallel system offering the same services for far less money.