A single qualifying question like "What sport does your team play?" is a good direction - instead of the data fetishism of these forms.

To pick one specific example, skin cancer visual screening seems currently recommended on a frequency based not on the speed of evolution of, say, melanoma - which can start and evolve pretty fast -, but on the manpower availability of dermatologists.

Recently my US-system, world-ranking university hospital complex was first convinced that my insurance would not pay for XXX (and consequently did not recommend it and delayed it). Then after I insisted and got that done, they told me how surprised they were (1) that my (US) insurance did in fact cover every single bit of everything we eventually got done and (2) how MUCH that same US insurance in fact paid them for each of the bits. On the first try. That insurance company has horrible problems, but I can't complain that they didn't cover the hell out of the thing. You know - on the same year we read everyone else's horror stories.

The whole system is very sick.

Support in forums and such was needlessly short in using RTFM as an answer. People could have pasted a one paragraph pointer to the documentation intake path and that would have helped.

But yes, no contest that the world has been on a simplicity binge. Python won by pushing simplicity and by having giant software corporations choosing it (and not complaining about the line noise nonsense). If you want to go into programming professionally, for now many years, you need python.

I don't know that I would put Javascript in the same bag. I mean, it's the other way: it looks simple and it isn't.

But python, yes, python won because it looks simple and google pushed it.

Many other languages now have to reckon with the python supremacy. This is not specific to perl / raku. It will take work for anything to replace python.

There is a common confusion in this (perhaps?). Most businesses get created primarily to make money. Not primarily to solve the world's problems. It's easy to say "if they really had their customers at heart...". Well, yeah, but that's not and has never been the priority. It's not a cynical view, it's being realistic.

All kinds of mayhem follows. All the way to fundamental research papers such as "on average actively managed mutual funds do not beat XX index". Well, yeah, mutual funds don't get created because someone is good at it. They get created because someone wants to make money. Beating XX is not the first objective, or competence, of the entrepreneurs. Hopefully that fund doesn't last too long but often it does, and anyway there are many of them.

So anyway, there are plenty of ways to try and leverage ideas of cryptography, crytocurrencies, block chain - most of which are still accessible - and most of the ventures in the field are not going to be primarily about solving the users' problems.

I'm fine with that: to program in Perl you need to be able to follow manuals, man pages, expert answers, - and even perl cookbooks, or CPAN or web searches. It's a technical tool. The swiss army chainsaw. It's worth it.

After that, experts would often propose multiple ways to do something when they answered questions. THEY found that intellectually playful and exciting. They still do. And for the rest of us, that was an amazing way to learn more and understand more of that tool we were using daily. Still is.

You apparently saw viciousness in this and that certainly sucks.

But I also think that people who are truly interested in programming immediately learn that there are many different paradigms. And the net makes it dead easy for them to explore different directions and, I don't know, fall in love with haskell or something. Perl is plenty visible enough for THAT. I don't know about perl 6 / raku though.

Perhaps too, a tool that's been around and in active maintenance for 11 years has been wildly successful.

The technical writeup is necessary. It's what spells out what they specifically claim to have done, and the specific results. "Specific" being highly technical and fundamental in the scientific community understanding the paper correctly. In particular, the in-depth statistics of many such papers is simply too complex for most of the population to understand, and that's fine. The technical write-up uses terms of art which do not mean what civilians read in them. (And while it's hard to do studies larger than this one, this is all the more essential in smaller studies.)

The interpretation would be useful because it's just plain dangerous to let your PR department write that. Even if they consult you. And it is interesting to focus on what the scientists themselves think they achieved. Both what they deliberately went for, and any ancillary result they think they notice. In this case in particular, they are very focused on this safety aspect, and they seem to not want to give too much attention to the efficacy aspect (which they probably did not plan for and is then suspect.)

How do you pick these 10? After the fact, necessarily. So then meaningless for tracking the economy.

I use "old" for shock value here while being totally in the camp that companies would do well to find ways to use older, more experienced talent at a lower cost than "normal". (Even after I have run into "older" as inflexible and a pain to work with.)

But there is also another problem in many of these reports: Older and still applying by sending resumes in response for job postings! If you are older you should have a network you can use. If they find nothing for you - or don't care to talk to you, then THAT is the better signal. And still not necessarily a signal about the job market.