2009? There is a joke about pretentious mac users in the movie “Best In Show” (great movie BTW) in 2000, and by that time it was widespread enough to be a funny side gag in a comedy about dog owners.

Never good to intentionally pollute.

Is COBOL subject to buffer overflows and use-after-free bugs? I honestly don’t know.

I don’t recall the COBOL code I’ve read using pointers.

Yeah let’s not forget the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) which was more full-featured of an object-oriented language than most “current” languages.

The dynamism allowed both Smalltalk and CLOS to avoid a dark corner that will confound your typical OOP’er today - the circle/ellipse modeling problem; they allow an object to “become” a different type on its own accord. Take that, Java!

Could be a crypto key, or a randomly distributed 64-bit database row ID, or a memory offset in a stack dump of a 64 bit program

And then JSON doesn’t restrict numbers to any range or precision; and at least when I deal with JSON values, I feel the need to represent them as a BigDecimal or similar arbitrary precision type to ensure I am not losing information.

That’s because the nearest representable float to 0.99999999999999 is 1.0 - not because Python is handling rationals correctly.

This is a float imprecision issue that just happens to work out in this case.

It’s worth wondering why, if Python is OK with “/“ producing a result of a different type than its arguments, don’t they implement a ratio type. e.g. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node18.html#SECTION00612000000000000000

How would you implement this in code?

JavaScript is truly a bizarre language - we don’t need to go as far as arbitrary-precision decimal, it does not even feature integers.

I have to wonder why it ever makes the cut as a backend language.

You have to explicitly check if the return value is an error and propagate it. You write the same boilerplate if (err) return err over and over again, which just litters your code.

That’s only true in crappy languages that have no concept of async workflows, monads, effects systems, etc.

Sad to see that an intentionally weak/limited language like Go is now the counterargument for good modeling of errors.

You know that choosing to post something represents an active editorial choice though, right?

Your activity in the forum has become the topic of discussion. You can’t wave your hands and say “It’s not me, take it up with someone else”.