CanadaPlus

Yes. That being said, it matters which language you choose. COBOL is always a bad choice, unless writing in COBOL is the whole point. There isn't really a universal best choice, either. Python is often a good one, but if you're doing something big it will become this meme.

I don't think that's quite right. It's more like if you have to choose a language before you know what you're doing, Python is the best choice. For anything large enough it's multiple places down the list, but you really don't want to have to learn Rust and possibly reinvent wheels for your quick boilerplate hack.

Honestly I've never had the displeasure. Or financial benefit.

Uhh, I'm pretty sure I've seen that, but I'm not sure where now. Any time you need to access a member of a list or array that's determined by a polynomial - which by Horner's rule covers all combinations of multiplications and additions - it would be a possible notation.

Transfinite algorithms are definitely a topic of research.

If we're talking mathematicians, you just know it's going to be ω-nested recursive functions any moment now. Just be grateful it's not all n with polynomial subscripts or something.

The more time a coder spends in #2, the more I trust them.

The trick there is that you'll be developing forever unless you get your hands dirty, because it like 80% works, and you need 99% to put it in any kind of prod.

Lol, we can't both be right, unless it's regional. Someone here is in the lucky 10,000. If it's me at least that means no crimes have been committed.

In Canada we don't, but you still fill your own cup. Is that not typical?

I really want to build and learn to use a medieval-style pole lathe.

Exactly. COBOL still gets used in legacy stuff, but at this point you'd have to be either insane or a historical re-enactor to build something new in it.

I've used C more than anything else, for reference.

Maybe I just like the idea of a closing tag being very specific about what it is that is being closed (?).

That's kind of what I was getting at with the mental scoping.

My peeve with json is that… it doesn’t properly distinguish between strings that happen to be a number and “numbers"

Is that implementation-specific, or did they bake JavaScript type awfulness into the standard? Or are numbers even supported - it's all binary at the machine level, so I could see an argument that every (tree) node value should be a string, and actual types should be left to higher levels of abstraction.

I actually don’t like the attributes in xml, I think it would be better if it was mandatory that they were also just more tagged elements inside the others, and that the “validity” of a piece of xml being a certain object would depend entirely on parsing correctly or not.

I particularly hate the idea of attributes in svg, and even more particularly the way they defined paths.

I agree. The latter isn't even a matter of taste, they're just implementing their own homebrew syntax inside an attribute, circumventing the actual format, WTF.