> for the last four years I've gone China in December so that I can avoid most of the festive period in peace.

This sounds like the premise of a christmas TV movie.

> I'm pretty sure in most jobs there is some kind of opportunity for learning.

This is absolutely not the case.

> I do remember thinking it's odd that a line has exactly 80 characters and putting an asterisk in the 7th or 8th row means the line is a comment.

You should check out IBM RPG and its various iterations, it's a whole lot worse than that.

As someone who spent serious time in RPG III in a previous lifetime, I would not advise anyone whose welfare I cared about or was responsible for to go look at RPG.

But yes, you are correct.

There is RPGII code I wrote back in the 80's that is still in daily use today. Most of the people who know I wrote the code have passed on, so the support calls have stopped.

Partway through that particular gig, the IBM CE came by and installed COBOL. (For many years, I had ranted about how much I hated COBOL.) So I transitioned all the RPG code to COBOL and what a relief.

So I had to eat a little crow.

Shortly after my gig, they went full scale IBM and built an IT department, as opposed to just a system 34 in accounting.

So no support calls for me.

> As someone who spent serious time in RPG III in a previous lifetime, I would not advise anyone whose welfare I cared about or was responsible for to go look at RPG.

One of my first gigs was working for a manager who loved RPG III. To the point where I was tasked with making a data collection interpreter using the same constructs RPG III is well-known for.

To this day, whenever someone mentions "RPG III" and what that project entailed, I think of the other one[0].

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket-propelled_grenade

Not really, as far as I've heard/read, at least in French media, they were very quick to point this out.

He was indeed a crook, but seemed like a nice, personable crooks, rather than the cynical ones we get nowadays.

He brought Nicolas Sarkozy to light, who was indeed part of a new generation of cynics.

I woke up, and realized that I was actually still poor.

I live in the general area mentioned in the article, and I hike in these woods quite regularly. It's depressing and scary as hell.

The footnotes in the links point out that they are affiliate links.

I think the shady comment was about profiting from another’s work (even if you’re upfront about it)

I’m not familiar with Amazon’t affiliate program, but it’s my understanding that these don’t typically take money from the author, their commission coming from the platform’s cut instead.

Given that, and seeing as the blog post author was upfront about it, I don’t see a problem with it unless the book’s author objects. Affiliate links don’t even steal credit — they give an author’s work more visibility to people who might be interested in it without cutting into their revenue. A commission is an incentive to share work you enjoy.

Oh I don’t really care about the ethics of any of this I was just pointing out that you seemed to be misunderstanding which aspect the parent was calling shady. It’s not that the affiliate links were poorly labeled, it’s that they were for profiting from the (in the context of the comment) questionably sourced material

If you ever market your product in France, don't use that acronym.

Explain please?

I dont know about that. I think having a visual representation of the sugar contents could work quite well especially for people who don't tend to read labels.

This is unfortunately not yet true everywhere, especially outside the big cities.