Apparently the JS name was selected and announced in partnership with Sun from the very beginning, and Sun had the copyright over both Java and JapaScript up until the acquisition by Oracle. I had no idea, but that makes perfect sense.

I don't know; I haven't caught up on the research over the past decade. But it's worth noting that this body of evidence is from before the surge in popularity of strongly typed languages such as Swift, Rust, and TypeScript. In particular, mainstream "statically typed" languages still had null values rather than Option or Maybe.

The ribbon that was introduced around... 2007, I think? Or is there a substantially different one now?

There is indeed a caveat in the introduction to the Reference that there may be statements in it that are specific to rustc. However, the authors strive to keep statements about the implementation separate from statements about the language.

The main reason there's not yet an "official" spec is that creating one takes enormous time and money, which are always limited resources. (Note that both C and C++ had no formal standard for over a decade after their initial release.) The Reference is "good enough" to make a formal spec not strictly necessary, and the existence of Ferrocene makes it even less necessary, since anyone who absolutely needs a spec can use Ferrocene.

Creation is easy, assuming the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics!

Or Stockholm Syndrome

The O'Reilly book Programming Rust is very much targeted at C++ users, even if it isn't explicitly marketed that way.

I read the first edition, which predated async Rust, so I can't comment on how the second edition handles that topic. But the handling of everything else was, I think, excellent.

The Crowdstrike problem was in fact a Crowdstrike problem. It affected Linux too, but of course there are vastly fewer users of Crowdstrike on Linux: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2024/07/21/crowdstrike_linux_crashes_restoration_tools/

This is pretty obviously a Microsoft problem.

The bit about Rob Pike at the end is killer.

I remember thinking that Qt seemed like a really good approach that should be more widely adopted...until I actually had to use it.

Not that it's terrible; it's really not. But C++ is just not at all a good language for anything UI stuff.

It absolutely can be constructive. The reason people respond that way on SO is because it is genuinely common for people to think they need something because they've misinterpreted the core problem they have.

Those benefits both make sense, but are those really the original motivation for Microsoft designing the Blue Screen of Death this way? They sound more like retroactive justifications, especially since BSODs were around well before security and internationalization were common concerns.