> You're out here talking down to people like "you whippersnappers don't know what you're doing" when you're literally decades behind the curve. I'm doing no s

> You're out here talking down to people like "you whippersnappers don't know what you're doing" when you're literally decades behind the curve. I'm doing no such thing. I've done nothing wrong. I know C and PL/I well, and I see little or no influence on C from PL/I. > Go has this, Rust has this, lots of languages have this. Language that give the developer the ability to control how their data structures are laid out in memory are not a revelation, we know about them. When I was at IBM's Watson lab, we designed the language KnowledgeTool. Then I looked at some of the literature of programming language design. I didn't find anything very new or exciting. It looked like a dead field. I haven't looked again since then. Some years ago I made a decision, to do my computing on just one of Linux or Windows. What influenced me: (1) After some trying, I didn't find any documentation that explained even simple things about Linux. E.g., just what is/is not in a Linux "distro"? Do all the distros have the same operating system APIs, the same utilities, and run the same applications? What are the differences in the distros? (2) What progress has Linux made in exploiting 64 bit addressing? (3) With Linux, for operating system updates, do I have to compile the operating system? The books I found didn't say. Dirt simple questions; no answers. (1) For Windows, I was already using 3.1 or some such. (2) I was and still am impressed by the relatively high promises of backwards compatibility. (3) I looked around and saw some large Web sites using Windows. (4) Microsoft runs some astoundingly well organized, huge server farms running Windows, e.g., just for their MSDN documentation. It appears that they have operating system installation down close to just push one button and bring up 1 million square feet of racks with servers. (5) From what I've seen, I like the Microsoft file system NTFS. (6) I want a LOT of good documentation. E.g.. for .NET I found, downloaded, read, abstracted, and indexed about 5000 MSDN Web pages. I put tree names in my code and have a single keystroke in my editor that will have Firefox display the page. Maybe this is something like what Microsoft does with intelisense -- but since I don't know anything about intelisense I can't say. Microsoft's documentation is really good in some respects -- the pages are nicely formatted; they often have references to related pages; there is some organization to the pages; they spell the words correctly; etc. I get torqued at times, e.g., when they use terminology without defining it, explaining it, or linking to such content. For several of their major efforts, I still have no idea what they are driving at -- as far as I can tell, they don't explain. E.g., I went for some months getting their news letters touting Azure. Lots of talk about Azure. How good Azure can be. How to get started with Azure. And with all this, they never explained what the heck Azure actually WAS! Eventually Azure leaked out: It's a Microsoft server farm set up so that users can send their code and the farm will run it. So it' cloud computing often running some user's code. Okay. Now I understand the basics of Azure. But I'm reluctant to bet that the Linux documentation is better. (7) At the time, Microsoft had $40 billion in cash; now they are worth about $1 T. So, Microsoft DOES have the resources to keep Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, various utility programs, malware defenses and corrections, etc. up to date. (8) Microsoft has a LOT of users, and sometimes some of those users post good answers to some questions. (9) I found that if really get stuck and really do have a serious question, then there are people at Microsoft who will give some fast one on one tutoring. E.g., early with VB.NET, I wrote a little routine to use classic heap sort to sort an array of instances of a class. I ran the thing, and it ran for 600 seconds when it should have run for about 2 seconds. So, right, I didn't understand just what I was supposed to do with polymorphism -- I was supposed to write an interface. Gee, we did much the same back in Fortran. Okay, polymorphism has a lot of hype and, really, is much like what we were doing with old Fortran; have to write an interface; I found some examples, tweaked a little, got an interface, and running time about 3 seconds. An amazing part is that somehow VB.NET essentially dynamically discovered the data type of the class I was passing to the sort routine. So, maybe all that is available via reflection. I was impressed. For GO, Rust, Haskell, as for Ada, Prolog, APL, etc., for me for my work now mostly no thanks. I need to eat; for that, need to make money; for that, starting a business. The business makes use of computing, and I have to write some software. For that software, on Windows, I picked VB.NET. It's fine with me. I suspect that I could convert over to C# without much trouble. One way to convert would be just to run my VB.NET code through a translator that writes out equivalent C# code -- my understanding is that Microsoft has such a translator. As far as I can tell, VB.NET is a plenty good way to get to the Windows services and APIs, the .NET Framework, and the common language runtime (CLR). Maybe some programmers take pride in learning lots of languages. Okay. But that's not what I am: Instead, I'm trying to start a business. Besides, I don't see much attention to GO, Rust, Haskell, etc. on Windows. On being "behind", I don't think so: The amazing thing about computing is the low cost and high performance of processors, storage, and communications. Other than that, the significant things in computer science and practical computing have changed only very slowly. To me programming is essentially defining storage, writing expressions to manipulate storage, the control structures if-then-else, do-while, and call-return, handling various data types, e.g., strings, dates, and handling exceptional conditions. To me the key to my startup is not the computing at all -- it is just routine. The key is some applied math I derived. So, I'm an applied mathematician in business who uses computers. The computer tools I use are the ones I want for my business. Since I won't be using Go, Rust, Haskell, Java, Ada, Prolog, etc., I don't pay attention to them. Someday I may use some Python or JavaScript -- if to, then so be it. Microsoft has Iron Python that is compiled and maybe has good or full access to the .NET Framework. Okay. To me, the future of computing will be in mathematics, complete with theorems and proofs.