They also aimed at what turned out to be the wrong target: When Itanium was conceived, high-performance CPUs were for technical applications like CAD and physics simulation. Raw floating point throughput was what mattered. And Itanium ended up pretty darn good at that.
But between conception and delivery, the web took over the world. Branchy integer code was now the dominant server workload & workstations were getting crowded out of their niche by the commodity economics of x86.
Income reporting is not the problem: Anyone paying you any significant amount of money is required to file with the IRS, including if you’re paying yourself.
The issue is the broad range of deductions and credits that depend on things like the composition of your household and your primary residence. Contra some expectations, the IRS does not keep a database of who’s shacking up with whom, where, or if kids are in the picture.
Though at the same time the bit where `use strict` was optional wound up being off-putting to a lot of us, at least in part because we'd always wind up with _something_ that wasn't designed for `use strict` and had, uh, interesting failure modes.
It's the same drive that we see from JS to TS these days, or adding type hints to Python, and even to some extent why people pick up Rust: because you get a refusal to act and an explanation rather than wonky results when you goof.
IME there's been a wider shift away from worse-is-better, and Perl was kind of one of the early casualties of that. Part of that is also how science has marched on: When Python and Perl were new, the most popular typed languages were kind of tedious but not what people would consider _good_ at types these days. Perl was the first language I learned, and if I was transported back to the 1990s, I'd probably still pick it, even if I don't use it in 2025.
(OK, maybe I'd go all in on OCaml. Any way the camel wins.)
Probably stretching the cultural metaphor too far here, but Rust has much more of a “vanguard of the proletariat” vibe & appears susceptible to some of the problems inherent in that political mission.
I was on the crest of this wave—I actually taught myself Java and Scheme the summer before my freshman year @MIT—so I’m fairly certain that’s not quite right.
The intro CS curriculum stayed on Scheme until it switched to Python something like a decade after the Java hype cycle.
What I believe did change was the intro software engineering lab (6.170) switched from CLU (?) to Java around that time.
Have you considered the possibility that 401ks and pension funds etc are included in those numbers?
Open for the elite in the way that everyone else don't have enough money to matter.
The richest people are so much richer than everyone else that there's no comparison. You could grab a million average people off the street and all of you combined probably wouldn't be richer than Jeff Bezos. Think about that. This one guy is wealthier than a million other people combined, literally wealthier than an entire small country or large city, and he's not alone. There's more of them.
Those guys rule the world, everyone else are passengers.
Yes, good call, you're right. Does that completely undercut my sentiment? That said, I'm all for Dell and every other billionaire jumping on board as well because you'd end up with a pretty nice entitle--err--nest egg for the future. I even have a clever name for it: pre-social security.
But between conception and delivery, the web took over the world. Branchy integer code was now the dominant server workload & workstations were getting crowded out of their niche by the commodity economics of x86.
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