astockwell

Now if someone could publish a patch that overcomes the 10,000 fleet identifier limit!

> I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me

Damn. Doesn’t that just sum up so many interactions (and sadly, relationships) in life.

This is the fundamental trust challenge with private/profitability-driven 'science'.

Would this logically extend to also include C-reliant languages like Python and Ruby (the latter being mostly a grammar underpinned by C) as technical debt also?

Disclosure: Didn’t read. But I did always get heckled at gatherings for inverting my controls, and then forgetting to switch them back. I think it came from whatever console you started with first (Sega Saturn), if you played early PC joystick games (Tie Fighter!), and Goldeneye’s Solitare configuration, which allowed deadly accuracy without needing to invoke the crosshairs.

Chesterton's Fence

This is probably the right answer. Similar to "dont fight the police on the street, fight them in court". Can even quiet-quit during the project if you need to.. software can take an awfully long time to build..

Also, track your time during the work. And keep all correspondance. Paper trail, paper trail, paper trail.

I imagine Finland's would be similarly branded a disaster if the present-day internet/social media megaphones had existed..

History books on 1945 aggressive monetary policy change: "The public didn't like it"

History books on 2025 aggressive monetary policy change: "The public went frigging bananas, doxxed their leaders, coordinated widespread disobediance on the scale of GME, etc"

(Granted I live in the US, and that's putting it mildly how the US would react)

Link?

I think you are 100% spot-on. Good enough has always been fine for the vast majority of people and the vast majority of use-cases.

Couple this with decreasing costs of storage (and ideally compute), and it doesn't matter if the data model is garbage, people can still get something workable that's better than the awful Excel files they curate now. It will still make errors, but eventually fewer than their spreadsheets.

In college, in a music class (History of Jazz maybe?), I had to miss an exam, and the professor assigned me an essay to make up for it: Life and impact of Django Reinhardt, minimum of 10 pages (back in the "12 point font, Times New Roman" days).

This was in the early '00s, and hand-over-heart, there was less than 10 pages _on the internet_ about Reinhardt. The collegiate library was not much more help.