Luckily, I was not ingrained by my first programming language like that, or my coworkers would strangle me.

I started with BASIC, which allowed only two letters for variable names…

Just remove Windows. One problem less on the list.

Nothing special. It was a natural progression to move from UNIX, Solaris, SunOS, and VMS to Linux.

Yes, but those were only two distict flavors, and both had a lot of pull. And those special instructions were only needed in special applications and drivers. With RISC-V we are talking about a dozen different flavors, all by small and mostly insignificant players and the commands that extend the basic command set are commands for quite common operations. Which is a totally different scenarion than the SSE/3DNow issue back then.

Actually, I think RISC-V is even worse than ARM. With ARM, at least you have a quite reliable instruction set on the CPU. With RISC-V, most vendors have their own extensions of the instruction set, which opens a big can of worms: Either you compile all your stuff for your own CPU, or you have a set of executables for each and every vendors flavor of RISC-V commands, or you exclusively use the RISC-V core commands. The first would be only for hardcore geeks, the second would be a nightmare to maintain, and the third would be not really efficient. Either way, it sucks.

While I have to maintain an old Windows 7 box to run some ancient software on it, I do most of my development work on a Linux machine. I use LibreOffice to read and write documents, use Inkscape for drawings in my documntation, but first and foremost, my main IDE is Linux native (although a Windows port does exist).

Regarding culture and affordability, there are some crazy things. In the next city there is an opera house. Which runs so hard into the red that each and every ticked is subsidized with several hundred Euro. The tickets are still expensive enough so that only the rich can afford them.

And this in a city that already runs on a big deficit.

Which system/distribution/device does show this message?

Same here. I was totally busy writing software in a new language and a new framework, and had a gazillion tabs on Google and stackexchange open. I didn’t notice any network issues until I was on my way home, and the windows f-up was the one big thing in the radio news. Looks like Windows admins will have a busy weekend.

I’m using IONOS for more than a decade now, and it works fine. I’m not into too much of web design, though, the personal web site is just a storage facility to move files around. I think they have quite some tools to develop professional web sites. Also allows for SSH access, which was helpful when I could not delete some files with filezilla.

Mail is good, too (Domain + 10 email accounts + catchall).

Take only fresh installed devices with you with only the absolute necessary data and applications. Create a new email address for anything on this device.

It is always a question of chosing the right tool for the right task. My core code is in C (but probably better structured than most C++ programs), and it needs to be this way. But I also do a lot of stuff in PERL. When I have to generate a source code or smart-edit a file, it is faster and easier to do this in PERL, especially if the execution time is so short that one would not notice a difference anyway.

Or the code that generates files for the production: Yes, a single run may take a minute (in the background), but it produces the files necessary for the production of goods of over 100k worth. And the run is still faster than the surrounding processes like getting the request from production, calculating the necessary parameters, then wrapping all the necessary files with the results of the run into a reply to the production department.

Well, you can use a tool, and acquire just enough knowledge to use it without too many accidents. And then simply give up on progressing any farther. Or you can keep digging into the mountain of knowledge to improve your skills farther and deeper. It is always your choice.

This is not a bandaid, this is the solution. What you try is, at least for this scenario, the band aid.

Have you tried weasyprint? It turns .html into .pdf. Then I use a script with pdfinfo with the -dests option to get the page numbers of the chapters, mixes it with chapter titles from the .html file to create a ToC, which, in turn, gets included into the .html file again - just like TeX does it.

This is helpful in an environment where inputs are either HTML or EPUB files, and output is PDF for printing, HTML for the web site, and/or EPUB-formate.

I don’t know if that person would have the intellectual capacity to actually understand the very concept of TeX: Writing a source and compiling it into a document. That idea would probably fry his mind.

I already explained this in my post of yesterday in this thread. I’ve been the TeX admin at our university in my student times. I’ve been creating styles and \shipout macros. I know this stuff inside out. Heck, I’ve even read good parts of the source to understand some finer points.

If you work with LaTeX for five years and still have no idea what a hbox is or what that message means, you should not consider naming this “experience”.

Guess what? I have moved my large text layouts over to HTML. Creating printed TOCs in a PDF takes some effort, but once I got that under control, it worked. Takes a makefile, though, and a bit of discipline in the HTML file, but the result is surprisingly good.

You could have used a thin space every four or eight hex digits, showing that it is not really a space but making it easier to read.

But you cannot blame TeX for not being able to break such a construct.