It's asking the right questions of the person requesting the software solution that is hard.

"So why bother with medicine people will die eventually anyway?"

This sort of nihilism seems to be the new end-goal of conservatives. There's the sense that "you all will be screwed and must accept your fate; whereas we're rich and we'll be fine and that's how it should be, because God ordained it."

""we(1) don't think you(1) have a prayer of stopping this(2), so let's talk about what we(3) need to do to survive it, rather than letting you(4) kill the economy(5) chasing 'solutions' that will not work(6), while all of the high profile people in your(7) camp continue to live lifestyles well beyond what the rest of us do(8) as they fly around in private jets(9) screaming about how we need to reduce emissions(10) and doing their level best to accrue political power to themselves(11)"

1. we/you tribalism

2. don't think/prayer: hand-waving is good enough

3. who's "we" now?

4. oh, its "you" again, the anti-'we"

5. placing hope that uncontrolled climate change won't kill the economy worse

6. "will not work": we opt to continue down this dark alley w/o a flashlight

7. Now it's "your camp" again? The old "them" vs. "us", except when it suits "us" to say "we"

8. That does need to change, but it will affect everyone

9. Funny how the environmentalist activists fly around in private jets all the time. They must own the entire private jet output.

10. I don't here screaming. Do you here screaming? I hear an attempt at reasoned discourse.

11. Finally, you get to the real issue: scientists gaining power at the expense of industry. Oh, how dare "they" suggest unbridled profiteering is bad for 99.999% of humanity! The gall!

1. There is no climate change
2. We're not causing climate change
3. Climate change won't be so bad
4. Climate change might be bad, but shit happens

Retired at 61. Before I did, I interviewed at some big, well-known places. Got a few six-hour interviews and several more lengthy phone interviews.

This is what I learned: it's all about prep, not about job experience or proven career accomplishments. I could have done that, if I wanted to spend a month or two studying algorithms, Big-O, and reams of sample interview questions.

But why? My job had became one of weaving together solutions built elsewhere to solve a bigger businees-specific problem. If I had to do some tricky array sorting in JS, I looked at Lodash. If I needed some better way of managing UI state, I implemented a React app, rather than stick with the awkward JQuery. Messy SQL everywhere? Isolate and contain it behind GraphQL.

Sure, I did some state machines and optimized some poorly performing implementations, and that might require thinking about and relearning stuff for a couple of days. Big deal.

Did I get lazy? Maybe. Or maybe I just realized I am coding to produce a product, not to impress other developers with my knowledge of arcanery.

Well, this is the problem: younger folks want to hire people they can be friends with after work, but nobody stays 25 forever.

If one manager manages 10 young programmers, then what do the other 9 older programmers do?

I have a used 2019 Clarity I bought 4 mos. ago. 110mpg and counting. That's because with a 35-45 EV range (varies by outdoor temp) electric covers almost all our daily driving. I'm saving dead dinosaurs.

If you're used to working in a modern language, I think the verbosity of COBOL will crush your soul. But then, Java persists, so what do I know?

When you're writing type definitions, you're programming the IDE. If you want to spend time to do that, fine.

I've seen high divers hit the water head first and survive. I'd like to see them do that with a concrete sidewalk.

Two seconds of thinking about that statement would tell you this guy if full of shit.

How do I, as a buyer of goods, know the quality of what I'm buying if it's not physically apparent? If I buy a drug, or an airplane, or an electrical appliance, there's some assurance from the regulatory or testing lab that it's safe (FDA, FAA, UL).

Now, what is the cost of all that overhead in time and money? Should software development be slowed down and cost more?

Oh, well. At least I have kids that are still speaking to me. A couple of them.

Before PHP 8, sorting algorithms were unstable. This means that the order of equal elements wasn't guaranteed. PHP 8 changes the behaviour of all sorting functions to stable sorting.

Also, was the ternary operator evaluation order ever fixed?

Why? Just to keep Java users from having to learn JavaScript?

Seriously. I went from a big-ass Spring GWT implementation that had 100,000 lines to support a handful of web pages to a NodeJS/Handlebars platform that supported hundreds of pages in 10,000 lines. And no lengthy compile!