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AFAIR in France nobody sent out paramilitary units to quell the protests - read: instigate violence and save his/her election. And that makes for a huge difference. But if you prefer to ignore the facts not supporting your interpretation, well then...

Wrong. In France, this "culture of protest" means to go all-in, on strike, right from the beginning for any reason, be it serious or just a pettiness. And in France, taking it to the streets and making noise is more often than not some sort of a social happening, too often for economical reasons, like yellow wests initially did. Not for any "higher" reasons like democracy, justice, freedom etc. It's individual people and various interest groups competing (on a wider level) with each other in their subsidiary demands, united in their fear of loosing status and comparative influence of the social group they belong to. E.g. rail-road syndicates. In short: Citizens of a rich country worried about their pockets, demanding reforms, refusing change, regarding it be some a kind of a zero-sum game, thus preferring short-term egoistic strategies.

Compare it with Eastern Europe with seldom protests, maybe once in 20 years or so. And not against poverty but for justice (Slovakia), democracy (Ukraine, Serbia) or alike.

Don't forget in Europe you have between 25 - 30 holidays guaranteed, better health care - people live longer here, much much cheaper education (I had it for free.), better public transportation... And it's also closer to Asia.

Also there's definitely less extremes around. Less of the bad stuff. Less violence, less criminality, less guns, less social disparity, less racism etc. On the whole I think life is better over here.

Uhm, I wonder how would people from this village comment on it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucking,_Austria

And what about people without any knowledge of Scheme dialects? (Let's call them, for the sake of brevity "CS juniors".)

Getting rid of GAFAM.

Actually the idea of decoupling is quite interesting. It enables you among others to undo & fix the biggest mistakes of the current internet... for whatever that means... Besides having one common internet for everyone contradicts the idea of diversification - if that is the message of the day.

> it needs to double up on everything it's got

Fixing things have always been costly.

The concept freedom & democracy as understood in the west is... just a concept of western cultures. It is still rather new, just ~200 years old, albeit very interesting, indeed. I personally enjoy it, but I genuinely don't know if it's durable and good for masses.

The race is long and the end open.

Is there any tl;dr ? Thank you in advance.

There's the promise of faster Emacs (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GuileEmacs written in Guile Scheme.) But it has 2 main problems: A) it's apparently stalled and B) not even it's supposedly known-good commit is compilable... :-(

> IT professionals should work in a mainframe environment at some point (2015)

... in order to experience and learn that:

* Max depth of your file system tree is 2

* Password must be changed every month

* Max password length is 8

* Alphanumeric chars only

* No upper/lower case distinction

* There's nothing wrong about using java 1.7 in 2019

* "if <customer == XYZ> then <feature>" is just fine as a code pattern.

* To release uncompiled & untested code is OK.

* To release code with compilation errors is OK, too.

* To use CVS could be a huge step forward. Because the thing you've been using can manage only code files but not configuration files. Albeit "manage" is a huuuge overstatement here.

* Print out the list of changes and stamp it with a rubber stamp is the way to fix it.

* Permanently.

* Permanently-Partially. Half of the team was printing the other half was copy-pasting the list of changes to a file.

* For years. On the PCs. Not on the mainframe.

* In MS Word documents, not as a plain-text. Because reasons.

* Ok, several months after my predecessor left I gained enough confidence to ask for the permission to abandon the printing in favor of the MS Word. I was injured at the time and I thought like the pitiful picture of me limping between the printer and the desk 4 times a day could help me in an argumentation.

* There are mainframe developers who don't even know how e.g. XML looks like. No kidding.

* And they won't get fired neither asked to learn anything new. And their salary has 6 digits.

* etc.

https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gates+headstand And then click on "Images". However YMMV ...