I think his point in this case is you own the physical item but not the information on it. If not then I could buy some musician’s cd then I could say “Now I own their music” and start selling copies of their cd, publishing it, stealing their rights to it, etc. I think we can all agree that would be bad.

Piracy by definition is stealing.

And interest rates were a lot higher back then. No one had it “easy”

Trying to sanitize the internet? Good luck with that.

Fellow Xer here. My optometrist fitted me for my first pair of glasses for reading and said “welcome to your 40s”. I keep a cheap pair in every room and the nice prescription ones in my home/work offices.

Not sure what this has to do with boomers. I’ve heard people of all ages grumble about having to wear glasses.

The reasons I’ve heard (hah) are:

1. They cost a lot
2. People are biased against people who they see wearing hearing aids
3. It makes you feel old and face aging

I go on Wikipedia to look up a region in central Europe and an hour later find myself reading about obscure events in the 30 years war.

You need to arm 100 guys? 100 spears is a lot cheaper and easier to train than 100 swords.

Your brain deliberately forgets trivial stuff. Do you really need to remember every lunch you had? Same goes for all the mundane stuff in history.

On the other hand so little of the mundane stuff was recorded that when we do see it it can be a window into how people actually lived, like Samuel Pepys diary. The daily stuff was so accepted as boring and common knowledge that it wasn’t considered worth recording.

I’ve worked on satellite command and control software that is literally using a 1970s OS. The code is limited for historical reasons and you have to work with the structure you are given.

When it has been compiled into assembly language

Yes, two of the most important things I see comments do is explain things like boundary conditions, “This is why we stop at 50 here.” and historical reasons “We have to return a 1 here because we still use calling func FOO for all of our calls still and it expects 1 as the default…”

Another helpful use is to describe the expected format of the input. “We expect a struct with this format here…” Stick in a small example too. It makes it so much easier to quickly scan the code’s flow.

And turn signals are giving information to the enemy

Could be worse, it could’ve been customer_ID, Customer_id, customer_Id…

I worked with a guy who was smart but “useless smart”. He was convinced that “code is self descriptive”, that is comments are not needed because the code speaks for itself. Well that is like saying DNA is self descriptive. Yes, I can sit there tracing the code, tracking the variables, etc or you could make a small effort to describe what is happening instead and save me a lot of time and risk missing subtle points.

Yes, you don’t need to comment “n++” to say it is incrementing it but you should mention why you are starting with 1 instead of 0, etc. Boundary conditions are notoriously tricky and need to be documented. Then there are historical reasons that are NEVER obvious, “This function has to return -2 as a default because we’ve been calling it using X for years and it expects a -1 as the error…”

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I like it when people rag on their own code in comments. “This line is a kluge but I can’t think of a better way to do it right now.” Comment is dated 10 years ago.

Better yet. Only guy who knew the code retires/quits. The next guy who inherits the code finds out nothing was documented and it was all in the previous guy’s head. Next guy has to spend weeks analyzing the code, asking coworkers who shake their heads and buying beers after work to get the previous guy to help him.