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ddp

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I've been writing software since 1976. I've been fluent in APL, Basic, Z80/8080, Fortran, Algol-68, PL/1, Pascal, Modula-2, Ada, Lisp, BLISS-32, MACRO-32, C, and Scheme. I learned me a Haskell for great good but still prefer “The Little Schemer” and OCaml.

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I haven't used it enough to know what its limits are but there's a lot to like with Windows Subsystem for Linux running either Ubuntu or Debian. Compared with macOS, it's current (apt-get to your heart's content), as opposed to macOS' terminal environment, which is hopelessly out of date. I really like what Microsoft is doing here.

Well, when it shipped it didn't support Fusion Drives, which were the default when High Sierra shipped. Time Machine backups fell over and quit working (somewhat different issue, agreed) and before I got them working again, FileVault 2 ate both of the disks on both of my MacBook Pros causing me substantial data loss.

I also had two macOS Servers running on mac minis and they announced that they're discontinuing it, leaving Apple with no server offering. I also removed the discontinued Apple Airports from my network.

I plan to stay on iOS and Watch for now, though I only use my iPad Pro for music synthesizers and basic chat/browsing.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm being absolutely harrassed typing in my iCloud password on all my i-devices. In contrast, I think I've typed my Microsoft password less than 10 times in the last year.

I helped build Apple 1's. I had a Lisa. I've owned nearly every generation of PowerBook and MacBook and I've had enough. I bought a loaded Surface Pro tablet last summer and I ordered a new 15" Surface Book 2 w/ Nvidia GTX 1060 to replace my MacBook Pro. Not the new one with TouchBar, that one was so bad I sold it back to Apple for a substantial loss. It was a good run.

The point is that ':=' evolved in Algol 68 to solve the ambiguity inherent in '='. C is simply from a less thoughtful and primitive language family and modern languages still seem to be copying C's horrible syntax. It's also probably why technical papers are written in Algol-like pseudocode using the '<-' symbol in LaTeX for assignment.

VAX/VMS was always open sourced and available first on microfiche and later on CD. I don't know if this continued after Compaq and then HP came to own the code but that's how it started life. The only censored code was the license management facility, which realistically, was trivially subvert-able if you knew VAX assembly language.

Okay, noted. I don't think much of VC's in general. Ours were a decidedly mixed bag that brought little to the table, in retrospect.

I'm for universal healthcare but the ACA is collapsing in many states. I happened to ride back to Santa Fe with the CEO of Blue Cross of Omaha who told me that BC/BS of NM lost $100m on the ACA in 2015. That's a lot of money for anyone to lose. He believed there were a few relatively simple fixes that would go a long way to bring some sanity to the system. And let's face it, tax penalties are not the way to achieve health coverage for all Americans. Boo on Obama for not even bothering to try for Universal Healthcare...