Although R is technically a general purpose programming language, no-one uses for any other purpose but data analysis, including (Shiny) dashboards. Don't get me wrong, I love R and use it almost every day. But none of the other languages are for a singular purpose, except SQL.

OTOH, the fact that it's on the list is pretty amazing, given the point I've just made. As an R user, I've always felt that I was in a tiny minority, looked down upon by others. I wonder, are SPSS and SAS, Stata, Minitab etc. on this list?

Is that they are too short. It takes a long time to change your life, especially if you've been severely disadvantaged for a very long time, and because they know the program has a definite end-date, participants are much less likely to commit to long-term strategies for permanent change. Just put yourself in their shoes, if you can. Imagine having no fixed abode and being hungry all the time, and when you seek a brief respite from unrelenting misery and shame by indulging in recreational substances you are judged and also, more importantly, start to despise yourself.

Imagine that's your life for a few years, because once you start down that road, it's almost impossible to get a (non-criminal) job, much less ad-hoc employment. Then someone says they're going to give you $X, but only for a year.

What would you do?

Me hearty!

In a ground-breaking article published yesterday in the premier journal Nature, scientists have found that water is wet.

"Anthropic reported roughly three quarters of companies are using Claude to automate work". What, 3/4 of every company in the world? Way to go, Anthropic!

And are happy days really "hear" again?

I'm so happy! My dream has come true. Now I can write on FB, X etc. how evil Zuck and Musk are, and not only with examples of things they've done, but even better, I can make stuff up too!

And it won't get deleted, right?

Oh, happy day.

I loved OS/2. I am just a humble user and was a starving student at the time it was out, and the current Windows version was Windows for Workgroups. The OS/2 Workplace Shell was amazing! Desktop objects were actual object that could be interacted with via right-click. Everything about it was better than Windows. The guy who gave me a box of floppies to install it told me "It will turn your PC into a supercomputer". That was obviously BS, but it kinda felt that way, especially compared to Windows.

But there were no apps. Or rather, no free, "shareware" or reasonably priced apps that normal people could afford. I guess OS/2 was targeted at Enterprise customers, not consumers,

But then apps ported from Linux started to become available. I'd never heard of Linux, but when at last I got sick of OS/2 crashing and freezing, I switched to Linux and never looked back

It went like this: Windows would freeze and/or crash every day, sometimes multiple times per day, and you would lose hours of work before learning to save after typing ever sentence. OS/2 was much more stable, only crashing/freezing once a week or fortnight. But Linux, even back then, (almost) never crashed. It was free, much more reliable and had tons of free apps!

WTF, IBM?

I bow to your superior knowledge. I am basing my claim on job ads in my field. So, OK SAS might be necessary for employment in biotech/pharma, but what about every other industry that employs data analysts? I note that you do not mention SPSS, so I suppose you accept my claim?

Almost no-one outside of academia uses these applications, and those that do are the very largest companies and government departments. If you look at job ads for data analysts, it's all Python and R. What on Earth are the people that run Code.org thinking?

The issue is not about ability to follow procedures; it's about products that promise much but deliver little, and to use Cory Doctorow's term, the enshittification of everyday life.

Oh, the clickbait. Oh, the people who spend an unhealthy amount of time fixated on screens. If you thank that image is horrifying, you really need to get out more. Try looking around you at actual people (instead of staring at your phone) as you walk around an actual town or city in the real world.

Sheesh.

Yes, code bloat is a real thing.

Yes, things have got better (security, reliability), but they're still pretty sh*t.

The reason? "Productivity" (i.e. cutting costs by hiring less-experienced coders), and the insane belief of product managers that end-users want new features. We don't. We want our software to be so boring that we forget it even exists. The only updates should be bug fixes, including, of course, security features.

But how boring would this be for not only product managers, but also actual coders?

So, productivity + impedance mismatch between creators and consumers, probably.

Oh well, if you use open-source you can fix all those problems yourself, right?

That's a pretty none-specific headline! Which god, exactly? There are so many! How are you supposed to make a rational choice which one to believe in?

In an effort to look noble, they quote revenue. What about profit, and projected profit? It strikes me that very few large companies have the moral fortitude to forgo significant profits. I'll give them props when they release the profit foregone, and projected impact on share price.