Notice how they use the term "carbon free" rather than non-polluting? It seems like every discussion of nuclear, pro and con, technical and non-technical, left and right, develops Alzheimers when it comes to radioactive waste.

Nuclear is the dirtiest form of energy: We have still not developed a method of properly handling the waste products during their 10,000-100,000 year radioactive period. I am not worried about the next 500 years. I am very concerned about the 10,000-100,000 years after that. 500 years, twice the amount of time that the United States has existed, is rounding error for nuclear waste.

If nuclear were simply moving radioactive substances from one place to another this would be a different debate, but nuclear creates waste, highly toxic radioactive substances that did not exist before, poisonous to thousands of generations of people, unless we take steps that we cannot conceive of and have definitely not invented yet.

Highly dangerous radioactive waste exists in forms that are probably not very well secured today, but likely good enough for our lifetimes, and maybe for longer. But we can't keep kicking the can down the road. We need that 10,000-100,000 year repository figured out, and it will likely cost trillions of dollars over time.

And, yes, fusion power would be a good idea. Whenever that happens. 100% of nuclear power today is 1940's technology. Nuclear disposal technology is from the Stone Ages, when the answer was to throw your garbage into a pit.

The phone companies were supposed to have wired up these, let me be honest here, not so rural areas, a long time ago. The phone companies welched on their side of the bargain and left taxpayers holding the bag. These communities are just a few miles from Ann Arbor, one of Michigan's major cities. Washtenaw County is sometimes considered to be a part of the Metro Detroit sprawl.

I have a true story to share about Jared. When I was in my late teens (1994-1995) his girlfriend reported to me that Jared did not consider me to be a Linux kernel hacker. By that point I was maintaining two kernel modules and had submitted at least one patch to Linus. I ytalked Linus at Helsinki and he agreed to add me to the CREDITS file with the description "kernel hacker."

I have Jared to thank for reminding me that I belonged in the CREDITS file, even though my contributions were one-millionth the size of David Miller or Ingo Molnar. Every little bit helps!

I prefer to do web services development today, mainly in PHP, and I've been gainfully employed doing Linux work full time since 1999. Contact me if you have an interesting project for a Linux veteran.

I'm cooking so much more I've burned myself at least three times since the lockdown began. Not good for a programmer who needs to use his hands. Fortunately, I'm doing okay.

Just to give you guys some color commentary, I was participating quite heavily in Linux development from 1994-1999, and Linus even added me to the CREDITS file while I was at the University of Michigan for my fairly modest contributions to the kernel. [I prefer application development, and I'm still a Linux developer after 24 years. I currently work for the company Internet Brands.]

What I remember about ip and net is that they came about seemingly out of nowhere two decades ago and the person who wrote the tools could barely communicate in English. There was no documentation. net-tools by that time was a well-understood and well-documented package, and many Linux devs at the time had UNIX experience pre-dating Linux (which was announced in 1991 but not very usable until 1994).

We Linux developers virtually created Internet programming, where most of our effort was accomplished online, but in those days everybody still used books and of course the Linux Documentation Project. I have a huge stack of UNIX and Linux books from the 1990's, and I even wrote a mini-HOWTO. There was no Google. People who used Linux back then may seem like wizards today because we had to memorize everything, or else waste time looking it up in a book. Today, even if I'm fairly certain I already know how to do something, I look it up with Google anyway.

Given that, ip and route were downright offensive. We were supposed to switch from a well-documented system to programs written by somebody who can barely speak English (the lingua franca of Linux development)?

Today, the discussion is irrelevant. Solaris, HP-UX, and the other commercial UNIX versions are dead. Ubuntu has the common user and CentOS has the server. Google has complete documentation for these tools at a glance. In my mind, there is now no reason to not switch.

Although, to be fair, I still use ifconfig, even if it is not installed by default.

About 2 years ago I took up repairing and selling retro consoles. I still do programming, but it's a fun hobby that I keep getting better at.

I switched to Linux in May of 1994. That computer had a 486DX2 66 with a whopping 12 MB of RAM. Slackware was pretty much your only choice, and I installed Slackware 2.0 from 3 1/2 inch floppies.

It took me days and days to get on the Internet with PPP from my dorm room at the university, and from that experience I wrote a mini-HOWTO.

That's where I'd get started if I wanted an authentic 1993 Linux experience. Be prepared for nothing working as you would expect out of the box. Out of necessity I immediately became a Linux developer and author. I even wrote one patch for the kernel and at one time maintained two kernel modules.

Now I pretty much don't do any Linux development except for work, but I've been doing it for 24 years now.

Your choice of language should be context dependent.

C is used in some situations that spring readily to mind where Rust would not be appropriate:

1) Codebases that are elderly, dating back to the 1990's or earlier. Back then we used C for most things. Compiled languages were required for most types of programming, because interpreted languages were too slow for most things. [I know that Rust is compiled, but it also didn't exist until 2010. To me, something was either written in C, rarely in C++, or scripted.] You don't want to monkey with old codebases. If they're written in C, keep them in C.

2) Low-level programming. The kernel is written in C, and it should stay in C.

3) The command line. Shells and utilities are written in C and they should stay in C. There are so many utilities that you can use to lint these programs (from memory checkers to fuzz tools to any of the many versions of lint to output from both of the major compilers) that there really is no point in using anything else.

Rust and other, newer languages, including and especially interpreted languages should be used for new programming. Maybe if you have some things that are 10 years old or less then maybe you can convert them bit-by-bit to Rust or something else but it would be hard for me to justify this, either. I just don't see rewriting existing code piece by piece in another language to be a good use of programming time.

Oh, and by the way: Rust is ugly. No matter how safe or nice your language is in terms of security, the closer your language reads to English or another Western language the more successful it will be. All programmers (Western programmers anyway) have spent their lives since age 4 or 5 learning to read English or their native language. It's no surprise that the closer a programming language is to written language syntax, the more popular it is. I've been writing about this for a long time. C works, PHP works, and other languages work because they're extensions of the language of math, which is written in Latin. English is written in the Latin way, with Latin letters and similar syntax. Syntax, not just features, is important! Why do people both love and complain about Perl? Because people love Perl when it's written like English (French, German, Dutch, ...) and hate it when it's written cryptically, unlike English (French, German, Dutch...)

Enno Aare seems like a real person to me.

Has anybody attempted to look him up on Youtube? Enno has three videos and he actively responds in the comments. He posted a link to the sheet music he created for Water Ripples.

After about a 20 minute search I've established that Enno Aare is a man of Estonian descent. I was unable to get a listing for the man in Estonia, so he could either be unlisted or lives abroad.

The last time I criticized systemd I was accused of being intellectually dishonest.

I'm not sure how being a Linux developer and sysadmin both in my personal life and as a paid employee since 1994 could possibly allow me to intellectually dishonest about any subject having to do with Linux. Dishonesty about Linux could not possibly benefit me in any way.

What I said is that systemd started out being very buggy. Admittedly, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds, they shook most of the bugs out and it works okay most of the time.

Except that systemd changed the way everything has worked for decades, and not for the better.

I could go into specific examples, but suffice it to say that virtually everything that systemd has taken over, it is doing that job poorly. Seeing why services didn't work and making them work has gone from a 5 minute job to something that can take hours. Troubleshooting system problems by looking at logs has become arduous in some cases compared to looking at /var/log/messages or typing dmesg and having your answer in 2 minutes.

systemd needs to slim down and focus on what it does well, initializing weird devices. systemd has no business monkeying around with DNS, and that is just the beginning of the list of things it needs to take a step back from.

Call me intellectually dishonest, but I've been working with Linux for 23 years now (I installed Slackware 2.0 in July of 1994 from a stack of floppy disks) and I haven't failed to learn a thing or two along the way.

Americans should not stand for goods and service produced by forced, child, or otherwise illegal labor.

There is no labor shortage in the United States. Given high enough pay and benefits, all jobs will be filled by legal workers.

If picking fruit paid more and had more benefits than programming, I would have no problem picking fruit on the side.

If the prices of goods and services are artificially low because of forced, child, or illegal labor then they will have to rise. If it's uneconomical to make a good or service in the United States using legal labor, then that good or service should not be produced here. It really is that simple.

Which people are you talking to?

I've found that I didn't become great at making estimates until I had been programming for 20 years.

For years 21-30 I've been great at making estimates.

If you're working with customers hiring programmers from India with only a few years of programming experience or you're working with companies who practice age discrimination, then you're going to find that nothing ever gets done on time.

If you're working with experienced programmers, then your experience will be the opposite. Being able to accurately estimate how long your work is going to take I think is the last skill that a programmer acquires, and in my experience it takes decades of experience.

The biggest folly of inexperienced programmers is that every programming job is that everything is either a 15 minute hack or will take a few days at most. If this sounds familiar then you're not hiring the right programmers, or you're being penny wise and pound foolish in your hiring.

I hate to be overly negative, but based upon my 30 years of experience of writing software for a living, your level of education is usually inversely proportional to your skill level as an engineer.

And yes, I did attend a very expensive and highly-rated engineering school at age 18, but I had been programming since I was a pre-teen.

My first computer was a Commodore 64, which my parents gave me for Christmas in 1985 when I was in fifth grade. My grandfather bought me a matching disk drive. I was a lucky kid to get these gifts because my parents were and still are working poor. I now suspect that my grandfather also paid for the computer. In 2017 dollars, it was something like a $1,000 Christmas for me.

I didn't set aside my gifts after a few months like many kids do. A year and a half later I was published in RUN Magazine and received a royalty check for my efforts at the ripe old age of 12. I spent virtually every dollar I had on programming books and magazines. I managed to get on the Internet with my first post to Usenet in 1992 but otherwise I was isolated from any other programmer. I was and continue to be a self-taught, natural programmer. I took all of the requisite computer science classes at the university, but more often than not they managed to suck out all of the enjoyment I had been experiencing programming since I was a pre-teen.

More than three decades later, I'm still doing programming. I switched to 100% Linux in 1994, so I've been doing Linux development for almost exactly 23 years. I still remember those early days.

I'd like to begin by adding that an experienced programmer (let's say somebody with over a decade of experience) should be able to pick up any language. If you have been exclusively using one programming language for your entire career including college, then you must be one in a million. Most programmers that I encounter have picked up dozens of languages and syntaxes over the years. When I received my first royalty check for programming in 1987, I was programming a Commodore 64 in BASIC with as little machine language as possible. In high school followed by college I was exposed to the likes of Pascal, FORTRAN, C, Perl, C++, Java, and the standard UNIX things (Bourne shell, regular expressions, sed, and awk) before I took my first full time job out of school. I think my experience is typical. If you need to learn COBOL for your job, you should have no trouble picking it up. Having to learn a new language or a new programming environment should be no obstacle for an experienced programmer.

More to the point, my first job out of school was working with options traders on a trading system. They supplied the algorithms and I supplied the code. In the end the company folded, because it was too hard to compete against the big guys with their deep pockets. But one bank we integrated with had for the time an amazingly large list of libraries that their library depended upon (kind of like GNOME and KDE and a lot of other things today). One of them was -lcobol. Quite simply a part of their software buried deep in some library was written in COBOL. I don't know how old the code was, but this was the early 2000's so I doubt it was new code.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think this is the most likely scenario that a modern day programmer is likely to run into with COBOL. You're probably going to be working with a bank, and you will be using COBOL without having to worry about it. The library probably works fine, but the institution itself may occasionally have to delve into the library to add code or fix bugs. It's doubtful to me that people working in small or medium-sized organizations would be exposed to any real COBOL.

I'm tired of psychologists telling us that these huge percentages of people have mental illnesses.

There are around 7 billion people alive today. Psychologists are telling us that 1% of the general population, in other words, 70 million people worldwide, are psychopaths.

I'm not buying it. I'm not saying that mental illness doesn't exist. Quite the opposite. Someone very close to me has a mental illness. If you know someone with an actual mental illness then you know how rare, unique, and difficult to diagnose and pinpoint mental illness truly is. Mental illness is not a set of personality traits that conveniently fits in with the type of people that the American culture in 2017 dislikes the most, criminals and corporate CEOs. Most criminals in prison are drug users and poor people who can't afford good legal representation. Most drug users in prison aren't even addicts, if you consider that to be a mental illness.

What people may not understand is that CEOs aren't Middle Class. Most were born rich, so ultimately they aren't taking any risks whatsoever with anything that they do in life. It's not psychopathic or ruthless to start a company when if you fail you will return to your life as a rich man or woman, and if you want you are able to do the same thing again and again without negative consequences. Perhaps you will become even richer, but it doesn't matter.

Most people who claim that they have a mental illness, or have been diagnosed with and possibly given drugs for a mental illness, are in fact perfectly healthy individuals with these things we can't always control called emotions.

As psychologists step away from the DSM and step towards the light known as neuroscience, we will as a society come to realize that there is a much wider range of people that have perfectly healthy brains and nervous systems. We have to accept that normal and healthy people do things we don't like, but we also have to accept that what we like changes drastically over time while our brains are millions of years old and change much more slowly.