I don’t think most people understood what the “status quo” was until Trump started destroying it.

Yes, “status quo” is billionaires, and monopolies, and low-level corruption, and so-on.

But, “status quo” is also civil liberties, a somewhat functional department of education, not having the national guard chasing down brown people in the street, a bureau of labour statistics that didn’t invent numbers to please the dear leader, cabinet secretaries that weren’t actively working to destroy the thing they were assigned to lead, low-level crony and nepo corruption and not over-the-top obvious bribery, and so-on.

Heh, I bet if you’re the CEO of a megacorp, you might not even carry your own electronics. You just have a gaggle of assistants around you who you bark orders at, and then they use their electronics to do something.

Which do you use most often?

A CEO might have a nice desktop, but is always out playing golf and so mostly uses his phone.

This is true up until a point, and then the pattern starts to reverse. Like, the receptionist isn’t going to get 2 monitors. They’re likely to get one monitor and a very old desktop, or an old laptop.

Edit: Also an intern / co-op student / work experience student, etc. is probably as low as you can go on the totem pole of office work. I bet in many cases they’re not even assigned a permanent office / cubicle since they’re expected to shadow / be mentored by a variety of people. As a result, they probably get a second-hand, used laptop.

And, if the company has retail sales, techs who do installations, etc. they’re often very low on the totem pole, and they’re often not getting a computer at all. Maybe in some cases they’d get a “work phone”, so they’d have the same kind of equipment as the CEO, but effectively be at the opposite end of the pole from them.

Where I live, I still see people in a horse-drawn wagon. So, I guess horse-drawn wagons never died? It’s only used for tourists and weddings, but that counts, right?

According to Tiobe, PHP was the programming language of the year in 2004. In 2010 it was number 3 in the top 10 programming languages. It’s now out of the top 10 entirely. There really isn’t a language that has completely disappeared. Mainframes are still programmed using COBOL, Scientists are still using FORTRAN, even Lisp, which has been around since the 1950s, is still going strong.

Maybe Actionscript counts as truly dead, since it was tied to Adobe Flash, and Flash is truly dead?

I have a lot of bad memories of PHP. It was, for a brief time, the main language I used, but it was so ugly and inconsistent. The only thing I loved about it, at the time, was that it wasn’t Visual Basic. As bad as PHP was, at least I wasn’t making web pages in that pile of hot garbage. But, I never felt joy writing something in PHP. At best it was a slog. At worst it was like pulling teeth.

Just about every other language has given me moments of fun. Original Javascript was a mess, but it already contained scheme-like features. It was sold as being an interpreted version of Java, but it had features that Java wouldn’t have for at least a decade. C is a brutal and unforgiving language, but as long as you’re not working with strings, it’s great to have such low-level control over everything.

Maybe PHP has evolved like other languages, but I still am not interested in trying it out. Everything it was good at can be done better by other languages, and those are languages that give me joy, not pain. I hope it keeps dropping in the rankings so that people aren’t exposed to it as one of their first languages.