ryl00

> perhaps he wouldn’t have won if there was some kind of crash.

But there was! That bet started in 2007, and 2008-2009 saw the biggest percentage drop in the S&P 500 in decades with the GFC. We're talking down to levels last seen in 1996, at the worst of it in March 2009.

Was it Quake? I used to listen to that game CD in my CD player at work, back in the late '90s.

I'm 52 years old, and I have diaries stretching back to 1980 (when I was all of 9 years old!). Over the years I gradually worked on transcribing them from handwriting to comupter text, and that's made them much more accessible in the present day. E.g., when my father passed away in 2020, it was so easy to just search for "Dad" and revisit long-ago snippets from the past. (And to sadly realize that I'd taken his presence for granted over the years.)

I still regret my roughly ten-year diary hiatus from 1985-1995, losing the bulk of my formative high school/college years in the process. Because as I've grown older, and those memories become more and more distant, I've lost a lot of the day-to-day detail, trivial though it may have been, of my past.

Conversely, I'm 52 years old and I've never experienced living in a housing bubble until this most recent ten-year stretch (the runup in property values prior to the 2008 GFC mostly missed my area (DFW), though we were still adversely affected by the aftermath).

> But are you really going to say they stand up to films made in recent years with a fully mature vocabulary?

Sure! I've seen 19 of the 42 films you counted as being made between 1920-1945, and I'd say the overwhelming majority of those 19 definitely still hold up. Are you seriously telling me Double Indemnity (1944), City Lights (1931), Duck Soup (1933), and Casablanca (1942) are only fit for consumption by film students? If so, I'd say "lucky film students!"

> Perl had a really, really strong sweet spot in text processing.

Still does.

I'm 51. If it was me, I'd DCA it monthly into a 60/40 index like VBIAX over the next year or two. If the market drops near-term, you can re-assess your appetite/tolerance for risk. If it doesn't, you're easing your way into what should be a decent long-term position.

> Creating trees or graphs can be cumbersome

Wouldn't Rust have the same problem with this (if not worse)?

> You get nothing useful after a good meal

Uh... the nutrition that your body needs to keep going? Is this a trick question?

While the peak-to-trough drop wasn't as bad as QQQ's, the S&P 500 still managed to fall something like 40% from its dot com peak in 2000 over two years, and didn't fully recover until 2007. (And of course 2008 sent it right back down again for another five-ish years).

I have the opposite problem... I find perl's data structures so ridiculously easy to write that I can quickly build up arrays of hashes of arrays of (ad infinitum) while in the "flow". Throw in the ability to actually get references to things, and control de-referencing of things, and I've never felt perl has stopped me (for better or worse!) from doing anything with data structures.

I thought only Civ IV used python.

That's what tends to happen, at least in the code I've worked on. C/C++ for the bits that need to "talk" to the OS, python/perl/bash for scripting purposes, and Fortran for the number-crunching core.

> C, of course, just ignores this problem entirely.

Many C/C++ compilers special-case printf, and can actually catch some printf format string problems at compile time. For example, gcc 5.4.0 and msvc 19 warned about both of the dodgy printf usages in your example (the type mismatch and the wrong number of arguments).

This is one part (of many) of perl that I like, that it exposes the pointer-y parts to the programmer (to abuse :))

    # hash
    my %a = ( 'one' => 1, 'two' => 2 );
    my %b = %a;

    $b{ 'two' } = 99;

    # prints 2
    print $a{ 'two' }, "\n";

    # reference to hash
    my $a = { 'one' => 1, 'two' => 2 };
    my $b = $a;

    $b->{ 'two' } = 99;

    # prints 99
    print $a->{ 'two' }, "\n";