End Of An Era

Ah, the Faustian bargain of Rust programming. You surrender your mental wellbeing to the borrow checker gods, and in return, they promise your code won't segfault at 2 AM in production. After 15 years of watching C++ codebases implode spectacularly, I'd make that trade too. The compiler yells at you for eight hours straight until you're questioning your career choices, but hey—no more "undefined behavior" or memory leaks bringing down your servers. It's basically paying therapy bills upfront instead of incident response bills later.

Finally, someone said the quiet part out loud. Every time management pushes for a shiny new tech stack, my bank account feels a disturbance in the force. That moment when your 15 years of C++ wizardry becomes less valuable than a junior who completed "Rust in 30 Days" on Udemy. Memory safety? More like salary safety... for the company. The tech industry's greatest magic trick: convincing us that rewriting perfectly functional systems is about "innovation" rather than resetting the salary clock. Same playbook as when they renamed "programmers" to "software engineers" to "developers" to "ninjas" - different title, same work, fresh salary bands. Guess I'll start learning Rust while updating my LinkedIn to "Blockchain AI Quantum Rust Developer" to stay relevant until the next language comes to destroy my market value.

The bell curve of C programming knowledge is brutal truth wrapped in a meme. On the far left, you've got the blissfully ignorant newbie who thinks "printf is magic!" On the far right, the battle-hardened veteran who's seen enough pointer arithmetic to know that simplicity is king. But that middle peak? That's where the insufferable "I watched Fireship's 100-second video so I'm basically Dennis Ritchie now" crowd lives. They've memorized just enough syntax to be dangerous but not enough to realize they're one segfault away from disaster. The duality of programming education in 2024: either spend years mastering the craft or watch a YouTube video and call it a day.

VS Code users staring blankly at their life choices while WebStorm, CLion, and DataGrip users are doing interpretive dance with their CPU usage. One IDE, zero thoughts. Three IDEs, zero available RAM. The duality of development.

Ah, the eternal C/C++ programmer's dream - a world where you don't have to choose between sizeof(array) and sizeof(array[0]) just to get the damn array length. Meanwhile, JavaScript devs are smugly using .length while we're over here doing division like it's 1972. The utopian future depicted isn't flying cars - it's sensible array APIs that don't decay into pointers the moment you sneeze on them. Ten thousand years of programming evolution and we're still manually calculating element counts like cavemen with abacuses.

THE AUDACITY of young me declaring "I don't need math, I'll just make video games!" only to later discover that game development is LITERALLY a mathematical hellscape! 😭 Fast forward to the soul-crushing reality where Unity, OpenGL, C++, and every other game dev tool are CACKLING at your mathematical ignorance. They're all just sitting there like "Oh honey, you thought you could escape VECTORS and MATRICES? That's adorable!" Game physics? MATH. Graphics rendering? MATH. Character movement? MATH. It's math all the way down, you poor, delusional child!