"I'm saddened by some of the comments here. It's true that COBOL is not safe. It's true you shouldn't be using it for large portions of your professional setting. It's true that these sort of libraries appear to be slapping a bandaid on a broken bone... All of those things are true, but you should learn COBOL. And you should learn it well.
I wonder where we will be in as little as 10, 20 years. When the COBOL dinosaurs die and universities stop teaching the basics of computers. Young programmers are being pushed away from the harsh realities of COBOL (not to mention anything below COBOL), who's going to be building the building blocks in the future? Who's is going to keep optimising modern languages like Smalltalk and Simula? That minority is only going to get smaller..."
It would sound ridiculous then and it sounds ridiculous now.
It also pays to realize that when people say something makes them feel "deathly ill", they're probably using it as an expression to signify how shaken they are by something.
I guess it's a kind of armchair environmentalism: it's easy to "go green" by switching to canvas bags (which _does_ help, a little), but then not make large, more sacrificial changes that would _actually_ benefit the environment. I don't know. It's tough, though, because to a large extent we're forced into lifestyles that are bad for the environment. You can't just decide to stop using the electricity produced by the coal power plant in your city, for example.
I don't understand the mentality expressed in the article, where environmentalism is only observed for tiny pieces of waste that don't matter. These same people (like you mentioned) fly dozens of people on airplanes, which is so much worse. Or they have kids or don't update their home's insulation or drive a gas-guzzler. At the end of the day, there's only so much you as an individual can do (and certainly the CEO of ExxonMobil is way more complicit in climate change than Jane Doe walking down the street), but as far as carbon footprint is concerned, paper invites (which are biodegradable) are barely a blip on the radar.
Well-played! I was testing you! Not really; I made a mistake. Still, though, I'm not doubting that packaging in aggregate isn't a problem, but as far as anyone individually is concerned, a few bits of plastic are the least of the planet's concerns.
Third choice: Slack exists, but doesn't hold your data hostage until you pay. I mean, on my list of things I care about ideologically, this is lower than my concern for warm gin and my dislike of sweatpants. It's legal and totally within their right, but it's a crappy way to behave.
It's true. Most of our climate issues don't come from teeny tiny packets of soy sauce. Consumer recycling might make people feel warm and fuzzy, but remember that a few years ago BP spilled 780,000 cubic meters (780 cubic kilometers) into the Gulf of Mexico.
No, a test will tell you whether or not that test passes; it says nothing about the correctness of anything else. But at this point, you're doing the job of a typesystem.
I think it's also hard because it's not as if crappy hours, tight deadlines, and low pay are directly killing people. Sure, stress is bad for you and you deserve to make enough money to provide for yourself and have healthcare, but I imagine conditions are overall still better than at the beginning of the labor movement, which involved rather dangerous factory work. It's easier for people to tolerate 60+ hour weeks and the like if they're paid well enough or if they hold hostile views towards unions, which I don't think is uncommon in the software field as a whole.
It's different if you get paid for overtime, though (usually time and a half). Companies threaten action against people working overtime because then the company has to pay more and that's a Bad Thing (TM), (even though the employees are providing way more value to the company than the company is providing to them), not because people want a staffing problem to make the company "wake up" or something. My mother doesn't work overtime out of the goodness of her heart, she just scrapes by and wants to be able to retire at a reasonable age.
I don't think it's necessarily a generational thing. I know people in their 30s who don't know what IRC is (or who at least haven't used it), and I know people in their 20s who DO use it (or at least know what it is). And it's not as though the knowledge is lost; IRC still exists and there exists plenty of information about it. It's just not carried around in people's heads as much. None of this is good or bad; it just is.