Speak for yourself mate. From where I'm sitting, the Chinese look pretty sane compared to you. But keep making shrill noises and telling us how everyone you don't like is evil, I'm sure it will just turn everyone against you.

The FORTRAN IV that I wrote in the early 1960's would still compile and run today. The FORTRAN II that people were writing a few years earlier wouldn't even compile and run by the time I started programming.

Not even slightly. They may have their roots in C, but there is more in them that's not-C than C.

C# (and Java, from which it derives) aren't even C-like, they just borrow C syntax. C++ and Objective C could be considered extensions, but C# and Java are entirely different languages with a completely different memory model.

It may be temporary (I doubt it), but it's not "very temporary" as the same thing has been reported for months with pretty steadily increasing urgency.

OTOH, the AIs clearly aren't good enough to replace programmers, or probably even coders. So what's currently happening is probably jobs being redesigned to use an AI where it makes sense. Expect LOTS of failures in this redesign, but it will be the successes that shape the future...unless the AIs get a LOT better. (Currently they don't understand the problem they're trying to answer.)

Molten salt may well be a viable answer to many problems. But, yeah, it needs development...and it's not clear that it would be cheaper for grid based power.

You're assuming that the current skills will serve you later. This MAY be true, but is by no means guaranteed. The interfaces of current AIs are definitely quite immature, and can be expected to change a lot. Probably also their competency.

C# takes a different approach, you target a specific .NET framework rather than "C#". That way it's been able to develop, but backward compatibility is still a thing.

I think at some point Oracle or Sun should have released a "Java 2" which included the lessons learned from the first iteration. No backward compatibility issues because Java 1 would still be a thing, but Java 2 could have fixed the holes and ensured the language had the features that are currently half-assed.

Plausible, if it's good enough. The real problem here is lots of shitty code being submitted. So much that they need quick ways to get rid of most of it.

As for "explain the code", that's trickier. I remember struggling to explain why I did something a particular way a few months later. When I figured it out again, it was the right approach, but it wasn't obvious why.

Well, prompts left in the comments isn't really a flaw, just an indication.

OTOH, what they're saying is "We're being swamped, so we're going to have to triage the code.", which is unfortunate, but reasonable.

Depends on the language. Where I worked you needed to work in SPAN (a language from SBC), but when they tried to shift us over to MADAM it basically didn't work. (I shifted over, but to PL/1.)

If jwz were reading this, he'd agree with you *righteously*!

What if you translate from one bytecode to another? eg into MMIX bytecode.

People didn't like embedded FLASH first.

You have to remember that data science majors are not programmers. They don't care about procedural correctness and are much too green to understand how their data gets into a CSV. They just want to apply some recipes they were taught in their last year of school.

This means that python/basic IS the right tool for the job, if the majority of the worker population has those characteristics.

In the case of R, it's because it's the only place where high quality research level statistical algorithms are built en masse (ML libraries in python are not a substitute, they tend to be built by non-subject matter experts who don't even know that there are corner cases)