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At the time (2014), the 8Gb machine was way more than adequate for all my needs as a writer.

Enter bloat.

Mac OS Catalina has essentially filled this machine to the breaking point. Six short years is the lifespan. Things (generally) work, but …

Most of the things that got cut were (to me) obviously obsolete. For example, replacing collections.namedtuple with typing.NamedTuple seemed like a clear example of obsolete. A reviewer really thought I should skip all NamedTuple and use frozen data classes.

More important are some things that I learned about …

See https://towardsdatascience.com/why-python-is-not-the-programming-language-of-the-future-30ddc5339b66.

This is an interesting article with some important points. And. It has some points that I disagree with.

• Speed. This is a narrow perspective. numpy and pandas are fast, dask is fast. A great many Python ecosystem packages are fast. This complaint seems to be …

For the author, a book is a journey.

Writing something new, the author describes a path the reader can follow to get from -- well -- anywhere the reader might be to the author's suggested destination. Not everyone makes the whole trip. And not everyone arrives at the hoped-for destination.

Second editions …

This is your "why wait" invitation.

Advanced copies will be available.

IF.

And this is a big "if".

You have to write a blurb.

I'll be putting you in contact with Packt marketing folks who will get you your advanced copy so you can write blurbs and reviews and -- well …

Sometimes we call them "Belt and Braces" solutions. As a former suspenders person who switched to belts, the idea of wearing both is a little like over-engineering. In the unlikely event of catastrophic failure of one system, your pants can still remain properly hoist. There's a weird, but defensible reason …

I'm in regular contact with a few folks who seem remarkably incurious. Seem. Perhaps they're curious about something other than software. I don't know. But I do know they're remarkably incurious about software. And are trying to write Python applications. I know some people don't sail out of sight of …

Whew. Chapter rewrites finished. Technical reviews in process. Things are going pretty well. Look for Packt to publish this in the next few months. Details will be posted. Now. For LinkedIn Learning course recordings.

Here's a popular idea.

... a COBOL-to-X translator, where X is a more-modern programming language ...

This is a noble aspiration.

In principle -- down deep -- all programming can be reduced to an idealized Turing Machine.

This means that we *should* be able to locate all the state changes in a given spaghetti-bowl …

Why didn't COBOL evolve more successfully?

FORTRAN, OTOH, has survived precisely because it--and more importantly, related tools, esp compilers--has evolved to solve/overcome many (certainly not all!) of the sorts of pain-points you describe, while retaining the significant performance edge that (IMHO, ICBW) prevents challengers …