I never quite understood the massive hard-on programmers have for splitting hairs.

I can see exactly one use case: context-aware OCR of code.

Late 80s. Little kid me got picked up from school but dad still had work to do, so I join him at work. He notices I’m bored. Sits me in front of a terminal to their Unix mainframe, opens up Pico. I type in stuff there, happy as a clam. Good times.

There’s Servo too. So ladybird can crash and burn for all I care.

Pascal is so awful. Damn, I wish it was dead.

In C too*.

*for certain compilers, that is.

I had just graduated, fresh engineer and super happy I landed a pretty good starting engineering job in a great company. I was quite lucky. Engineers dropping like flies, becoming taxi drivers, or whatever they could find to sustain their families. All investments everywhere were dwindling. Thankfully oil prices were high regionally so some remained.

I’m sure it would. But in many languages a double negative just reinforces the negative. Hence the question.

Can they answer “not no”?

I don’t know if it was you, but thanks for the initiative.