This has been my primary research strategy for the past decade.
It's digging gems from piles of rubbish, but when you find them you know that they are genuine.
> Calling Thing::default() clearly communicates that your just getting baseline values and not a lot of magical other initialization stuff going on— with a Thing::Thing() in C++, you're really at the mercy of whatever the project conventions are for how "fat" the constructor is going to be.
In C++ the constructor without arguments is called default constructor.
Of course the expectations depend on conventions, but usually it's something from uninitialized garbage to an empty state.
I wish I could say just "no" but nowadays you can't be sure where used laptops have been anyway. If you can't buy a new laptop, you could as well just buy one that has been in China.
> Lambdas, Streams… Java is far from "80s style OOP" today.
Streams are a library feature. At a cursory look Boost seems to have had something similar since 2003: range adaptors[0].
Moreover lambdas have existed since 70s. They are modern only in the sense that Java got them in 2016 or so.
> It steals the best from the more avant-garde languages and builds it in coherently. That's no small task, so it takes few years.
That's a nice way to say that it gets new features only when they are undeniably useful.
> Therefore I wouldn't call Java "cutting-edge", but "modern" easily.
If Java is modern, C++ is cutting edge. It got the syntactic sugar for lambdas in 2011 - five years before Java.
However I may have put too much weight on "modern" in the question title. The demand for Java coders is going to be higher than the supply not unlike COBOL.
If you can live with its limitations, you can make a living maintaining Java codebases for decades to come.
Java was designed to support 80s style OOP. While many mainstream languages do the same, it isn't particularly modern. I haven't followed Java's evolution in the recent years but as I recall it is the last language to adopt anything new.
> there are places on the internet that do the bare minimum of moderation and only remove illegal content. Unfortunately, only the worst members of society seem to frequent these types of forums
Could you link to worst examples? I think that finding these with search engines might be difficult.
The dynamics of the KJV were different. N competing Versions had caused divisions among the people,
so the king ordered the making of one universal standard. The translation committee was aware of the goal and tried to avoid bias.
Curiously it didn't result in N+1 competing Versions, but KJV was almost universally approved and many older Versions were retired.
Readers have been content for over four centuries now.
In the case of NWT I think the bias matters because JWs deviate fatally from Christian orthodoxy.