I was going to suggest to anyone interested in VMS to head over to the deathrow cluster but unfortunately it's now dead. https://deathrow.vistech.net/410.html
Interesting. I remember Jon Bentley [1] mentions BLISS multiple times in his book Writing Efficient Programs.
The book is a gold mine of software performance tuning techniques (with recommendations on when to use them or not), organized in the form of many numbered and well-named "rules" (so that you can remember when to apply them) about saving time or space, or trading space for time or vice versa, all with plenty of examples and "war stories". The book also talks about working at many levels of the stack (although most of the focus is at the level of program code), all the way from hardware up to algorithms.
I took a brief look at the BLISS language, and I have to say that it does seem a bit verbose, though in general, in the larger scheme of things, that may not matter, given other qualities of a language, or may even be an advantage over more cryptic or concise languages.
That's not how I read it... Going to school means interacting with dozens/hundreds of other people (many of them peers who are still developing social interaction skills). Encountering those behaviors is inevitable in that setting.
That's about what I was getting at. You also get authority figures that are inconsistent and tyrannical, the wonders of bureaucracy, and extreme limitations of personal liberty. You get to learn how to deal with stupid and illogical people, bullies, and all the other elements of the vast canvas of personality types.
It's great training, and not to be discounted. But having a haven of stability in the home is an essential counterbalance.
I came here to write basically this. I know some parents who use the attitude of "the world is a rough place, so kids need to learn how to deal with it" as a justification for dealing more harshly with their kids than I would (kind of like valuing a "school of hard knocks" approach).
Based on my own childhood, I both totally agree with the premise and come to a fairly opposite conclusion: home must be a haven since it is the only place that has any reasonable chance of being a haven. School almost certainly won't be; other kids can be real assholes sometimes.
It's what I know about. Also, public schools have to take everybody, so you are more likely to have to encounter people across the spectrum of abilities.
I've seen a lot of people that went to private schools really not understand just how stupid can be nor how such people think, because their world was chopped off at something like a 105 IQ floor.
No one at school knows them or cares about them, like in the real
world where most people are utterly indifferent. Just as your boss or your therapist does not really care about you neither does your teacher. Some friends do, eventually, but you aren’t friends with someone instantly. They don’t know or care about you at the beginning either.
It was a bit, but only about 1/3 ended up with an onsite.
Part of the reason is because I hadn't spent as much effort on this earlier in my career; now with the concern of agism, every time I'm on the market I try to level up my skillset.
How do you find GNUcash? I looked at it awhile back and found the UI so antiquated compared to modern tools, but I'd prefer something different than the commercial provider I'm using now.
The UI may be antiquated but it does what it needs to without any lock-in, and you have control of your data. Plus you can do you accrual based accounting which just makes so much more sense (I may pay my car insurance premium once a year, but it is a monthly expense)
I had a similar experience working for a food distribution wholesaler in Melbourne. We rode pallet trucks and time pressure was so intense that there were guidelines on the number of steps where it was more efficient to walk next to the pallet truck rather than ride on it. I couldn't keep up and lasted all but 2 weeks. This was 25 years ago and it's disappointing nothing has changed.
