Thanks for sharing! I'll start putting everything here in practice immediately. Some of these are already widely practiced at the company I work for, though, so I probably won't stand out too much.
As I've become more experienced as a programmer, I've grown to hate unit tests that rely on mocks. They don't test a damn thing and they calcify code by making it a chore to update, since you have to update all the useless tests that don't do anything too.
There are several programming languages with package managers that work better than NPM. Not having one is not a positive no matter how you try to spin it.
What exactly would you package manage if you had a package manager for COBOL? You will never get paid to work on any COBOL code that isn't proprietary, and sealed with the blood of innocent victims. You are not going to be installing the latest hot js framework on a mainframe.
> You are not going to be installing the latest hot js framework on a mainframe.
I think IBM would disagree with you, given how much they've pushed Linux (and, therefore, Linux web servers running Node and kin) on their mainframes. You won't be installing much of anything like that on a midrange system, but Linux on Z is pretty well established.
Doesn't that depend on the client company, rather than IBM? I'm going with what I know from the one (big,financial) corp that I worked in with COBOL on mainframes; there, we didn't use linux at all.
Anyway those environments are downright sclerotic (the worst thing about working with COBOL that nobody mentions). They didn't even let me install Firefox on my work laptop. They had people doing web dev, obviously, but the mainframe teams were more, let's say, conservative.
I know you’re attacking my point but I think you’re actually agreeing here. COBOL is tied to proprietary stuff running on big iron, and its claims to modernity are window dressing.
Signal is funded by the US State Department[1]. I'm sure you can trust it to send messages to your drug dealer, your mistress, or the competitor you are selling you company's secrets to. I wouldn't trust it if I wanted to keep secrets from american 3 letter agencies, though.
DARPA was going to contribute money to the OpenBSD project (which also maintains OpenSSH) before Theo said some things critical of the Iraq war and they retracted it. I wonder how many people would have accused them of being CIA plants if they took the grant money. Regardless, there are many competing interests and bureaucracies in the US government and it's not a safe assumption that they are in cahoots with each other on encryption they can break on demand. It's usually a more complicated picture than just "the government". Some of this funding is likely with the well meaning intention and goal of strengthening the security and privacy of communication between Americans.
Also see the history of "window" (chaff) in World War II. R&D people for both the Allies and the Germans realised, as improvements of the new "radar" continued, that radar doesn't see a difference between an aeroplane and a suitably sized radio-reflecting object, say a strip of foil. So, if you chuck a bunch of these foil strips out of a plane, now the enemy radar is full of "planes" that don't really exist.
Both sides stalled deployment of this trivial yet effective countermeasure because they believed once they used it their opponents would immediately understand how it was done ("Gee, immediately after the German bombers did that trick which messed up our radar we found loads of metal strips in trees all over the area they attacked...") and so copy it - and both had "official" estimates made which said their opponents would surely benefit more than they would once it came into use.
nushell has a similar philosophy to PowerShell but without the strange command names. PowerShell is probably tied too deeply to Windows and .NET to be suitable as a Linux shell
