virtualized

You are not wrong.

What I read between the lines: “I have such a fragile ego that I feel offended when a tool points out a mistake I made. I feel intellectually rewarded by doing the same busywork over and over again. I don’t want to change the way I do my work at all. I feel left behind when people other than me have great ideas about language design.”

TIL you can actually drag Scrollbars on iOS. They are so tiny I would never have assumed they react to a touch.

“The dog/child/vacuum cleaner ate my instruction manual” is probably a common support request at Lego, so there is no point in making the digital manuals difficult to access.

Begin by throwing the language away. Provide a tool that converts existing CMake scripts to the new, sane language. Use an established programming language for the new language.

real web sites are somehow still worse than this parody

Apparently not. It is crazy that they delete a random line of code and don't update or add a single test at the same time. Absolute madness. I wonder what they are doing instead that ensures the Kernel mostly works.

Yes, and that's what automated tests are for. They "replicate" specific conditions and make it possible to cover everything. That's what unit tests are. This has nothing to do with the physical world.

Another way to put it: If you know how long something will take in advance, you have a solution in mind. It is unlikely that this solution is (A) the best one and (B) the one you will actually implement. It would be stupid to ignore information you learned along the way. If you could actually predict the future you should invest in the lottery, not in software.

EDIT: Of course there are projects where you actually know exactly what to do. Happens a lot in consulting. That has nothing to do with Agile though.

I actually said something like that during a meeting. "Yes, you can do it that way, but if someone finds out we will be in the news." This argument worked surprisingly well.

It's weird how languages like YAML, XML and JSON are very much designed for communication between machines, but are still the default choice for human input. Actual programming languages - designed for use by people - are rarely considered for high level configuration.

I have actually seen something similar to this happen:

1. We just need a few configuration options. Let's add an XML configuration file.

2. Keeping all the configuration files in sync for different environments is a lot of work and really error-prone. Let's generate all the configuration files. What about an XML meta-configuration file?

3. Some things are different between environments. We need conditionals in our XML meta-configuration language.

4. There is a lot of repetitive configuration. It would be more maintainable if we had loops, variables, integers, string interpolation, functions, ... in our XML meta-configuration language.

Great, now we invented our own awful programming language that lacks any tooling, documentation or libraries and isn't compatible with anything else.

What kind of genius does one have to be to earn $800k? Or do you possess rare knowledge and connections in your industry?

You just said "They are huge, but they are actually not very good" in a lot more words.

"but it looks fine on my $4000 MacBook with my perfect 25-year old eyes"

Paypal has recurring payments and I thought it was exactly this. Never tried to cancel via Paypal, so I am not sure how this works.