Shell scripts were a mistake. The weirdness you have to remember to safely stop executing when something fails is mind-boggling.

nushell scripts aren’t shellscripts?

exactly. Forking for any reason is the essence of FOSS.

Scenarios like OPs were taken care of right from the start. That’s just the legal side, tho. But someone still needs to do the actual work which is why it sometimes fails.

Public funds.

There actually are lots of initiatives (e.g. https://bigdatastack.eu/european-open-source-initiative ) but it’s still young and there are multiple problems between available public money and contributors actually earning a salary.

Money is not the problem.

either earn a good living being a code monkey, or find a job in a small company that has passion

crazy idea: let’s publicly fund FOSS projects so devs working on stuff they like with a passion can actually make a good living and enable sustainable non-profits to hire expertise, marketing and all the stuff a company needs

the result would be actually good software and happy devs

That was also the time where some classic tunes were created…

25 years in the industry here. As I said there’s nothing against learning something new but I doubt it’s as easy as “leveling up”.

Both fields profit a lot from experience and it’s as much gain for a scientist do become a software dev as an architect becoming a carpenter. It’s simply not productive.

there is so much time lost in research institutes because of shoddy programming

Well, that’s the way it is. Scientific code and production code have different requirements. To me that sounds like “that machine prototype is inefficient - just skip the prototype next time and build the real thing right away.”

It’s always good to learn new stuff but in terms of productivity: Don’t attempt to be a programmer. Rather attempt to write better research code (clean up code, revision control, better commenting, maybe testing…)

Rather try to improve cooperation with programmers, if necessary. Close cooperation, asking stupid questions instead of making assumptions etc. makes the process easy for both of you.

Also don’t be afraid to consult different programmers since beyond a certain level, experience and expertise in programming is vastly fragmented.

Experienced programmers mostly suck on your field and vice versa and that’s a good thing.

why would using a cdn I don’t control, from a non-contracted 3rd party and their “PageShield” app reduce my supply chain attack risk?

Am I not just increasing the attack surface since now my visitors can be victim not only by my servers being compromised but now also by the 3rd party being compromised?

serious question.

Consequence:

Software can only be good, when enough people WANT to work on it and with it along the complete life-cycle. There’s a critical amount of developers/contributors/testers and (feedback providing) users.

Hence a lot of critical consumer stuff is based on popular opensource.

Also, we’re entering an aera where the difference between hardware/firmware/software gets increasingly blurred. So all of this applies to more and more hardware, too.

• do one thing and do it well

byebye unix principles

I think solar occlusion is the way to go; you could harvest solar power 24/7 and beam it back via microwave;

That’s magnitudes more expensive than stopping fossils right now. Not to mention the impact on ecosystems worldwide.

Are these “generations” in the room with us right now?

otoh you have stuff like FreeCAD or OpenSCAD completely free and usable AND you could modify it as you please.

Back then FOSS CAD was barely usable.

Great, now find a project to apply it and collect your participation trophy. :-P

Just use your media corporations

Exactly. It’s easier for smaller NGOs to do political lobbying since they don’t have any media corporations available.

If you take that away, you’re basically left with big actors and social media.

and produce tons of excellent, reviewed but useless code on the way.

corporations with big pockets have more possibilities to influence than regular people, or even NGOs

I guess nowadays it’s cheaper to target social media and let the voters + traditional media do the lobbying.

Also young women had to learn to walk upright in a steady, feminine pose by carrying books on their head without them falling down.

Here’s the opposite since gorillas don’t walk upright.

Unironically Lynx and Elinks.

It’s true. And christmas trees would be fine if they’d end up in long lasting buildings and wouldn’t need a lot of fertilizer which usually is made from oil.