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> 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";

Yep. I'm still using my Alcatel Idol 4S Windows Phone as my daily driver.

Fortran 2003 also added BIND(C) and ISO_C_BINDING, which are massively useful in standardizing the C interop.

I can't speak for the others, but why do you think Dallas and Houston are moribund? Based on the last decade of population growth, their respective metro areas certainly seem to be doing well for themselves.

I don't care, I still love quirky perl.

Probably referring to examples like VAX/VMS filesystems? I never worked on them much, and only very shallowly. Fortran file I/O has vestiges of record-oriented interfaces still in the standard, I'm assuming from co-evolution with file systems of the time.

Why does column order matter? If you translate to the equivalent C/C++ row-major order, it should be laid out in memory the same way.

Engineering/science code, e.g. modelling real-world phenomena. Fortran code from the '70s is not that unusual to see, still in production...

> Perl's references are basically pointers. ... This is really a huge, unnecessary wart in the language.

Call me crazy :), but I count this as a pro for perl! It makes thinking about data structures in perl very "regular" for me.. there's a few rules to learn, but then I find it simple to construct (or de-construct) nested data structures while applying those rules. As opposed to other scripting languages, where the difference between "value" and "reference" frequently seems to be more hidden from sight...

Plenty of us still do.

> Would it really be “a massive undertaking to go GNU Octave” when its syntax is a superset of MATLAB’s?

Does anyone actually use MATLAB just for the "MATLAB" part of it? Where I work, it's the Simulink part that's locked us in... I'm still not sure how MATRIXx withered away and gave Mathworks free reign in the control systems design space...

Reports of Fortran's death (latest standard 2018) are greatly exaggerated (much like C). It's receded to a niche, but it's still a very important niche (numerical, HPC). Hopefully, the development of a new Fortran front end for LLVM (from PGI/Nvidia?) pans out, as this would fill a gap in LLVM's offerings, and provide more competition for ifort and gfortran.

This is where perl really shines for me. Regular expressions are front and center, making it so frictionless to slice and dice text. My bash knowledge is so stunted because I bail to perl as soon as the going gets tough. :)

Sounds like me. :) My non-replaceable battery is starting to go; otherwise my Windows 10 Mobile Phone is still giving me just enough (maps, weather, music player, MMS, email, web, camera) to get by.

> A huge chunk of scientific and numerical libraries rely on Fortran, for which 64-bit support is seriously lacking on Windows.

How so? mingw-64 exists, and so does Intel Fortran (with good integration with the VS IDE as well).

Neither is it a "footnote", especially in its strongest domain, numerical computation.