A relative who studied at CMU 40 years ago told me that was the way Pittsburgh townies spoke.

What would happen would be the Star Trek episode that made the least amount of sense?

James Harford (1997) Korolev, Wiley, pp 244-245, citing an interview of Shevalyov (a man, not a woman, I remembered this part incorrectly) by author Harford.

"I had translated the English commentary word for word. What's more, I used the same triumphal enthusiasm in my voice as the American narrator."

Korolev . . . was . . . livid with rage. "Why did I use this tone of voice."

"Shall I stop?"

"No, no, but use a different tone of voice."

To the extent that wind and solar are necessary to save the planet, their deployment won't come without pain.

Like my skyrocketing electric bill, and my annual household electric use is about 2400 kilowatt hours yearly as a result of my energy efficiency and conservation measures, thank you very much, and I would be saving money for my troubles were it not for people having thrown up their hands about Amory Lovins-style conservation and energy efficiency (my source for this was utility executive John Rowe of Exelon) and are spending money like crazy on giant wind turbines and square miles of solar panels.

The Soviet chief rocket designer Sergei Korolev wanted to know more about what the Americans were doing. Hence he arranged a screening of a film on the US rocket program for he and his deputies.

Midway into it, he angrily scolded the woman who was simulataneously translating the English-language narration. Apparently the translator was not only speaking the words in Russian, she was reproducing the excitement of the American narrator on how glorious the American rockets were. Korolev demanded that she translate the rest of the movie narration with much less enthusiasm.

Seventeen-and-a-half freakin' cents a kilowatt hour. And I don't even live in California.

OK, OK, yeah, yeah and yeah, but why this instead of OpenJDK apart from, say, the renegade Klingon or is he a Khan wannabe?

He was a speaker at the U, and I meat a guy who paid his way to the ISS. His ride was on a Soyuz.

I read that first-to-orbit-Earth Yuri Gagarin "had to go" just before his trip (OK kids, you are going to the bathroom, even if you think you don't need to. It it will be quite some time before we stop again.)

Legend has it Gagarin took a wiz against the tire of the truck that drove him out to the rocket, and ever since, every crew member does this for "good luck." I wanted so badly to ask Dot-Com Space Man guy if he did, but I couldn't bring myself to asking this.

How long did you tell them it would take?

An hour.

How long did you think it would take?

An hour.

Laddy, you've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker!

Part of why they charge so much is that they carry the hardware store with them in their truck.

Even then, they have to make a trip to the hardware or home-products store for something that was supposed to be on the truck but they ran out of.

Any attempt to repair a leaking galvanized pipe fitting will end with fracturing the fitting.

The way this works is that galvanized pipe is vulnerable to corrosion in a way that copper pipe is not. If a section or fitting of galvanized pipe is leaking a a consequence of corrosion, it is a certainty that any attempt to apply enough torque to overcome the corrosion preventing a pipe to be unscrewed from a fitting will end up fracturing something that is weakened by corrosion.

Oh, noes, Dark Mode will wreck the planet.

Haven't work with C# in decades because if I was going to work in such a thing, I was going to specialize in Java that is free of the influence of The Borg.

Yeah, yeah and yeah, Larry Ellison, but Larry Ellison is a Star Trek villain more on the level of a renegade Klingon, or maybe, just maybe like Khan, certainly nothing like the Borg.

That said, Java performance requires programming in a Java subset that resembles COBOL to not trip the garbage collector, and I never could figure out the rules for escape analysis that allocates an object or an array local to a function context and acts like stack allocation in C++. Does calling another function on an array break this, even if it stays local to the called function, or is javac or the JVM clever enough these days?

I find the need to do thousands of loop iterations of warmup to get Java benchmarks near C++.

That said, I know a dude who uses Julia for all of the machine-learning neural-network hacking that many others do in Python. Julia is garbage-collected but it doesn't use a Java-like virtual machine (JVM) and incremental translator (JIT) but just compiles everything to input to LLVM? I am thinking Julia could be "fast" whereas Java is "mostly fast"?

C is for 'Murricans.

I am partial to Pascal having been indoctrinated in the purpose and use of what is derisively called a "bondage and discipline" programming language by Denmark's 2nd most influential proponent, Per Brinch Hansen who once taught at a small institution of higher learning in the Greater Los Angeles Area in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the 1st most influential proponent being Anders Hejlsberg, whom I never met but spent much of my career using Turbo Pascal and then Delphi owing to the influence of what Brinch Hansen taught.

Back in the day, there was the European Reliable Software Mafia who were promoting bondage and discipline programming languages to address The Software Crisis as it existed in the early 1960s. Notable bosses of The Operation were C. A. R. "Skinny Tony" Hoare along with Edsger "I've got your GOTOs, right here!" Dijkstra. The pioneering bondage and discipline language was none other than Algol 60 or simply Algol, the ancestor node to a family tree of "Algol-like languages" that include C, if you squint hard enough, with there being some argument as to whether Algol itself was really an Algol-like language. For example, does anyone around here who thinks lambdas are a necessary feature of a modern programming language have a clue as to the semantics of Algol call-by-name?

Maybe not a software Mafia "made member" or "button man" but certainly an affiliate to The Organization and valued inventor of bondage and discipline programming languages was Niklaus "The Swiss Cheese" Wirth, who invented Pascal as Algol stripped to its bare essentials and later built it up into something usable in the form of Modula 2 and later Oberon followed by Component Pascal.

In the mean time, Wirth's languages were largely ignored along with the metastasized versions of Algol known as Algol 68 and later Ada, a creature of U.S.A. defense procurement but viewed with contempt by 'Murrican programmers because it is French.

Pascal, or Pascal extensions or Object Pascal continued to enjoy limited use with Digital Equipment reputed to have a really good implementation and Turbo Pascal having its heyday on PC-DOS. The objection to Pascal was long that it didn't have a standard implementation and that it wasn't FOSS nor portable until it somehow, owing the tireless work of people who aren't Murricans, became all of these things in the form of Free Pascal, which has compiler switches for the Apple and other dialects but is largely Delphi 7, for which Anders Hejlsberg is the coolest language inventor, even if his spoken English wasn't a fusion of a Scandinavian accent with California Surfer Dude, making him cooler yet. Still under the spell of Professor Brinch Hansen, my go to language these days is Java/Swing for the GUI front end and Delphi 7 for the native-code back end compiled to Windows, MacOS and Linux using Free Pascal.

As to programming language syntax, I have long resigned myself that C-syntax of curly braces and that odd function argument-list use of round braces for if and for statements along with prefix data type declarations and a function returning not arguments being of type void has won, so why do the language designers of Go and Rust try to reinvent this?

Next, we are well into the 21st century, so why do we think ourselves clever to use a programming language (especially in 'Murrica) that still has text include statements with all of the baggage that goes with that when Wirth's Modula 2 had such an elegant solution that Java and even Python is using it in the form of import?

Finally, what sort of problem is Rust supposed to be solving in the systems-programming domain that hasn't been solved by Ada? Yes, Ada was a horror of complexity back-in-the-day, but with everyone having a Cray Y-MP on their tablet device, the blazing compile-and-link speed of Pascal is no longer a game changer, and developers, I am told, have figured out how to make compliant Ada implementations. Are people such bigots that they won't use Ada because it either has a US Defense Department taint or because it is French?

I have my "issues" with C, but C is what it is, and what it is, Rust isn't.

Joel Spolsky back in the day when people were reading his blog posts offered a software engineering guidline of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it because fixing it will make many more bugs."

In the Spolsky-esque traditions, the Linux kernel contains many shims and patches to work within the limitations of C, but if you change it over to something else, even portions of it, you lose all of what those shims and patches are doing. Never good.