[vishnu]

Everything you've said makes perfect sense, I am by no means a Luddite, my personally owned daily driver has 12 four GHz CPUs and 32 gigabytes of RAM, it runs Slackware Linux 15.0. I've never used any Microsoft products, so I divest myself of any opinion about them. My first job out of college was with AT&T. I've never coded in anything other than C & C++, with the exception of BASH and Perl. I don't know anything about Rust, or Go, or Swift, or C#, or Python, or any of the other "golly gee this is the way cool way to the future" languages. The way we look at it at my place of employ, if you can't do it using C and C++ with Linux and X11, Xt and Motif, it's not worth doing. We use a whole crapton of extra widgets with the programs we write, which is to say, widgets that aren't part of the official Motif distribution, for example the plotting widgets from Fermilab, the BAE widget for spreadsheet processing, I won't bore y'all by continuing on regarding them, but really, the stuff that Qt or GTK can do? Motif can do all of that. Motif is LGPL and we have zero interest in switching toolkits for anything we write. We don't sell our software to anybody, we use it for our own internal purposes and we share it for free with our customer, the US Department of Defense, what they do with it, or whoever they share it with, for example our competitors in the defense industry, we don't care. And for what it's worth, programming isn't my main interest, my main interest is rainfall in this area (Eric Idle joke).