Why it's ColdFusion...done wrong!

According to Wikipedia, only roughly 3k people a year go to jail over tax evasion in the US. It could make getting a legitimate job difficult, but instances of physical restraint are small relative to the total population.

It's called "Artificial Sloth Scaled". Makes a catchy acronym.

Yeah, like lack of drivers for completely contemporary peripherals. Like the machines that were rated for Vista, but couldn't really run it for shit.

What? Seriously, why do people put up with absolute crap from Windows and still worship it? The problems I had with Vista required thousands of dollars to be spent on new peripherals, and several new machines on consultation that people had to buy when they cheaped out. All to do exactly what they were already doing.

Yeah, I mean the remaining Windows machine I have is running Vista, whatever the latest SP is, and it's okay. But it took too long to get that way.

Microsoft's This was what got them into trouble with Vista in the first place. They decided that peripheral manufacturers had to write the drivers.

Now why would this be their fault you might ask? Simple. Manufacturers of equipment don't feel like writing drivers for equipment they no longer sell. Sort of makes sense, although it's a bean counter decision that breeds ill will. But a lot of people still have this equipment, and if Microsoft doesn't have drivers for their equipment, and they know about it, thay are annoyed. And if they buy equipment and find out afterwards, now they are pissed.

Apple and Linux have a different approach, and I have found some truly ancient peripherals that say, work on Linux, but nothing nor anything planned for Windows (an ancient USB to serial adapter put out by Staples for example) working FB on Linux.

Microsoft uses the old adage that they will make their users put up with just about as much shit as they are willing to put up with, and many of us just don't find it worth it any more.

JavaScript is the new COBOL already? Damn, I'm gettin' old. (At least COBOL works :-)

The hardest part is trying to get a web browser to act like a desktop GUI, which is what customers want. We have to glue together a jillion frameworks and libraries, creating a big fat-client Frankenstein with versioning snakes ready to bite your tush. Great job security, perhaps, but also an Excedrin magnet. What use is lining your pockets if you die too early to spend it?

It's time for a new browser standard that is desktop-GUI-like friendly. The HTML/DOM stack is not up to the job.

Dynamic languages (JavaScript) are fine as glue languages and small event handling, but to try to make them into or use them for a full-fledged virtual OS or GUI engines is pushing dynamic languages beyond their comfort zone. Static typing is better for base platform tools/libraries. You don't write operating systems in dynamic languages.

Somebody please stab and kill the HTML/DOM stack so we can move on to a better GUI fit.

They never actually live up to the hype...I remember when the salespeople were touting dBase II and how programming would be completely changed. Right.

For custom biz app programming, dBASE and clones did live up to most of the hype in my opinion. I was able to crank out small-to-medium CRUD apps pretty damned quick compared to using Pascal or MS-BASIC or C (of the day), and users were quite happy.

True, you were limited on UI conventions, and if you didn't follow certain code conventions, dBASE's loosy-goosy scoping rules would byte you in the ass. But the tight integration between the language and the data simplified a lot of CRUD idioms. And its command-line prototyping was magical.

dBASE got a bad reputation when people started trying to scale its source code size, UI, and market (packaged/box apps) beyond its original niche. If you use a Toyota Corella to haul big trailers, it will indeed fail. Use the right tool for the job and know its limits rather than force things.

I was programming circles around everybody else with dBASE for smaller apps, even against MS-Access (and more reliable). It did well what it did well. Good Times; I miss it.

The Lenovo looks good, but a brief session with it at the store left me feeling like it wasn't sturdy. If you think it's good, I'll give it another look. I'm pretty sure my sort experience with it was not enough to form an opinion.

The reason I have the 2 Surface Pros is because I got one and it really fit my needs and then bought a second newer model. I didn't really look at other options, but I will.

Well, you've already decided that "racists will go to great lengths to try to rationalize their bigotry". You probably decided that a long time ago, probably before even examining the facts involved. But you want to call me prejudiced?

We have examples a-plenty of racists trying to rationalize their bigotry, so I'm able to make a generalization. I don't have any examples with you, so I cannot.

First, you better be able to point to which gene does what. The genetic differences between races is so minuscule that you had god damn better be able to say, "See, that gene right there is different and that's the gene for living in a trailer park and being a NASCAR fan".

Because we've had some very bad experiences in this world with people trying like hell to use ethnicity as markers for behavior.

It's not like we are talking about Poodles and Retrievers. It's exactly like "all humans are poodles" and we are arguing superiority based on hair style.

Good one. I plan to use that, just so you know.

Where is the official rule that "programming languages" have to be Turing Complete?

And don't...say HTML5 + CSS3 is turing complete

They are to a good hacker.

Ada actually has some nice properties, but its sheer number of features makes it difficult to learn and find developers for.

Committees do tend to catch feature-itus because they try to make everybody on the committee happy. It's difficult to get good pruning of features from committees. They are pretty good at generating ideas, but NOT good at weighing trade-offs by saying "no" to the right things.

...be replaced by pattern matching AI...

Can't, I just patented Artificial Sloth.

Congress will goof off for 3 months, then rush to pretend like they were investigating it.

Worse, they pretend the whole time, but blame the other party at the end of 3 months regardless of (non) findings.

"Why did it take them so long to discover the harddrive was recycled? That looks suspicious, very very suspicious. More investigations, charrrrge!"