Re: Honestly..
I've got some for the BBC B that are still going.
5893 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2007
I agree to a point, and indeed have on occasion found that by being patient and not drawing attention to their ignorance, initially hostile people became my most emphatic supporters. However there are some who regard anyone who understands something they don't as an existential threat. You will never get anything but hostility from them.
They wouldn't just have to write their own kernel - no mean feat in itself - they would also have do so in a way that has an identical interface for the rest of the system... or write an entire OS and application level. I don't see that happening any time soon
Agreed. I would suggest the only thing counting github pulls is good for is... counting github pulls. In fact I can't think of any reliable method of assessing coding language popularity. How do you count establishments that have their own in-house teams working on their completely closed systems? What about all the hobbyist Arduino users? Does its subset of C++ count, or is it a 'different' language?
You just reminded me of of a time in the 1960s when I was applying for a job with Radio Rentals.
They presented a non working set (valve in those days), then told me to write down every step I took and left me alone. They were quite surprised when I asked for a second sheet of paper, and one of the guys sauntered over to have a browse, then went away rather quickly.
Eventually I finished and presented them with a working set, having found and resolved both faults. I was immediately told I had the job, which rather surprised me. Later I discovered that they'd only put one fault on it, but the set had developed a second one, and I found and detailed both.
Simple advert stating what the job was. Interview was with one of the engineers. Presented with a questionnaire with about 30 different situations to answer fairly briefly ranging from Electrical safety, to PLC programming. A couple of days later I got a call inviting me to have a chat with the boss. After about 10 minutes of quite unrelated chat, he said "By the way you've got the job. See you tomorrow."
The only reason I left (18 years later) was because I retired!
For years this had not been totally compliant, as it would accept XML with a blank line at the start (which apparently the spec says is a nono for some reason). Eventually they decided to clean it up, without bothering to tell anyone, and our code that had relied on the library exclusively suddenly failed to load any files.
It turned out, the devs hadn't noticed that their library was itself generating these blank lines on saving, and we had to do a hurried check for, and remove them when loading. I believe they eventually responded to the howls of protest.
P.S. We still make the check - just in case.