On a bright side, young aspiring actors can make porn movies to get some cash early in their career without necessarily having to fear it will ruin their career many years later - those movies will exist anyway.

Right now, my biggest nightmare are VST plugins. They are in fact the reason why I didn't upgrade my PC from an i7 920 for years. I estimate it will take me at least a week of full spare time use to deinstall them on the old machine and re-install them on the new machine. Steam would make many people a huge favor if they managed to enter the pro audio market, which still comes with their own installers, licensing schemes, DRM, spurious hidden support services, etc. All the bad stuff, exclusively for honest customers.

My prediction is that the net result will make everyone a little worse off in 10-20 years from now than if the UK had stayed in the EU, but the effect will not be very noticeable and overall hard to quantify.

> Why aren't they used?

They are used a lot.

> Is it because they are too hard to use, or to difficult to approach for a beginner?

They tend to be easy to learn but difficult to master for writing idiomatic code, i.e., have a relatively long flat learning curve.

> Is it possible to hear bad things about those languages?

Sure. In my personal experience, their biggest downside is the same as their biggest selling point: their flexibility. Code is generally hard to maintain and read by others. You can invent some incredibly hacky spaghetti code monstrosities in LISPs if you want to. More disadvantages: high memory use, dynamic typing and dynamic dispatch can suck big time (e.g. Racket OOP methods are mostly checked at runtime, which can lead to testing nightmares if you're not careful)

Overall, CommonLisp and Racket are pretty good 'batteries included' languages, whereas some scheme implementations are extremely fast and evolved small extension and scripting languages.

Maybe some groups within the NSA need the best and brightest, but the government in general doesn't. A lot of government work concerns accounting and administrative tasks that are neither intellectually challenging nor do they have a clearcut equivalent in business. Most government agencies cannot be run like businesses, because there either is no market to speak with or the markets for their 'products' are not free and open.

All you need is people who get their work done.

> but we must also make it easier to fire people (or manage them downwards) for incompetence

That only works if you start at the very top. If you get what I mean.

I'm using ForgotIt? [1] because I'm its author. It doesn't have a browser interface and doesn't have a mobile version. I would make a version for iOS if I used an iPhone, but I have never planned to make an Android version, because Android devices are just too insecure. (They are theoretically secure but in practice most of them don't get enough security updates.)

That being said, ForgotIt? also has some weaknesses that are laid out in its documentation. It doesn't lock memory, so you should use encrypted swap or disable it, and its keystretching algorithm compromises a higher security margin for speed.

Depending on your threat scenario you can also keep some of your passwords written on paper in your wallet. You could also keep them in a physically secured place like a wall safe. If you're worried about targeted attacks, that's in fact the best choice for most people, since no current operating system, no PC, no tablet, and certainly no phone is currently safe from a targeted attack by a dedicated adversary.

[1] http://peppermind.com

> Programmers are less intelligent, skillful and diligent on average than research mathematicians? How do you figure that?

Well, the selection process is much harder. It's an empirical claim that could be falsified, but the claim seems reasonable in lack of any counter-evidence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-universal_Teichm%C3%BCll...

Note: I'm not claiming that programmers should be treated like mathematicians or vice versa, I'm merely pointing out the differences of the activities.

Edit: There is of course also a more trivial reason. On average, research mathematicians are probably more intelligent, skillful and diligent than typical programmers.

Since it's holiday season, I'll give a more comprehensive answer with a literature recommendation: Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull. I'm pretty sure you'll like it if you haven't read it yet. Also relevant would be Gottfried Keller's Kleider machen Leute (clothes make the man), a beautiful love story. Unfortunately it apparently has never been translated into English.

If he had taken a better lawyer and fund manager, this wouldn't have happened.