Perl (5/6)?

Almost every tech site on the planet has that story and you pick the National Enquirer styled tech site?

Tsk, tsk. The submitter should be ashamed. The Register has shown itself to be completely untrustworthy.

I don't think you've seen how CS classes work in your typical grade school if you think OOP and recursion is a week 2 activity.

There is no other dimension. They are two related but different languages, so treat them like e.g. C# and Java.

I'm thinking they would be wiping their nose on their hand first or something. The flaw with this plan is that you have to have someone willing to infect themselves with a horrible disease like Ebola. This is harder than finding regular suicide bombers because Ebola takes a long time to kill you in comparison and the death is so horrible. Also, most people with Ebola are under quarantine, you can can't just walk up and lick them. Then you have to get your Ebola sufferer back to the west before they start showing symptoms and even then everybody flying out of a hot zone is going to come under increased scrutiny. Your Ebola bomber could very well find himself trapped in customs when the symptoms emerge and never carry out the attack.

As always, the devil is in the details.

The glut of cases in Liberia are mostly thanks to poor education and unfortunate burial traditions too. In the western developed world there's basically no chance of catching Ebola at the moment. If you know someone who just came back from East Africa then you have a small reason to be concerned, at least for a couple of weeks, but beyond that you can't catch Ebola because there is no Ebola to catch.

And send everyone over to the calm and collected voices of Fox News or AM Talk Radio?

She got sloppy and didn't follow the procedure properly. When you're dealing with late stage Ebola there is no room for error. Which sucks because you're wearing a sweaty biohazard suit in Africa and dealing with extremely stressed people and chaotic environments where you might be running out of supplies and can do little to help the people regardless. Maintaining strict quarantine procedures is doubly challenging in an environment like that.

CSS Zen Garden examples always kill me because they fall back to fixed positioning (which is horrible on phone screens, and one thing we were trying to get away from with CSS in the first place!) way too often. My first exercise with CSS was to create a slashdot style layout, with fixed columns on the left and right and the remainder of the space taken by an automatically re-flowing column of text/pictures in the middle. For a bonus I wanted the left and right columns to collapse if the screen got too narrow (smartphone). This turned out to be...challenging in CSS.

I also think that too many people threw the baby out with the bathwater when they ditched table based layouts entirely. There are lots of places where you have to got through a lot of effort to replicate in CSS what was relatively easy with tables, like making webforms. That three column layout I mentioned above is also dirt simple to do if you allow yourself to wrap the whole page in a giant table.

You're thinking about C++Builder. They are two different products, even if they happen to be owned by the same company, and have some compatibility in terms of using libraries across two languages.

It's mostly just you.

With respect to different versions not being backwards compatible, it's more of a branding issue. There are two languages. One is Python 2, the other is Python 3. Within each of those, there's backwards compatibility, but between them, they're not compatible in general (though with some care it's possible to write code that works in both, and with some more care it'll even do the same thing - but you'd best leave that to library writers...). For your own project, pick one and stick to it. For other people's code, you might need both 2 and 3, but you should only need one version of each.

Unlike Java, no-one is trying to sell Python as "the language to rule them all", though, and the performance makes it clear that you want other stuff for some things. Heck, even the official docs have that huge section on writing C extensions.

Why would you need that kind of stuff built into the language, though? With sufficiently flexible syntax, the libraries should do the trick.

And, FWIW, I hear a lot about people switching from R to Python (with the corresponding libraries, naturally - including an R bridge for gradual migration) lately.

Operator overloading is not different from functions at all - operators are just functions with fancy names. And a programmer can just as well define a function that has "multiply" as a name, but does something else entirely, as he can define operator * that does something else entirely. These two are identical in all aspects. The only reason why operators were historically not redefinable is precedent, and it doesn't have any reasoning behind it.